Belgrove Senior Girls' School

In fourth class, problem solving is a challenging area in maths. We have started to work on trickier problem solving sums in class and we will be doing a lot of work on them in class to improve our problem solving skills. I will start to send home some problem solving questions for homework too so that the girls are getting plenty of opportunity to practice them 

There are also some good questions that you can do at home if you follow this link https://ie.ixl.com/math/class-4 and scroll down to mixed operations. Start at F1 and work down through the questions. They get harder as you work your way towards F9

The more practice we do, the better we will get at them 🙂

Hope you all enjoyed the lovely mother’s day cups and cards the girls made last week 🙂 

We were studying various types of rocks and soils in fourth class. We had to sort and group the rocks and samples of soil  and then compare and contrast them, focusing on certain criteria.

We looked at different samples of soil from areas around Dublin. In our experiment, we added the same amount of water to each soil type and observed how each reacted.

We also had to look at the properties of various rocks in our groups and share our findings with the class.

Lastly, we explored the influence of soils and rocks on animal and plant life in our environment 🙂

We had great fun building 3-D shapes from craft sticks. Take a look at some of our work 🙂

Here is the website link for coding if you have some free time over the midterm 🙂

http//code.org/minecraft

Today we celebrated Italian Day in fourth class. Thank you to all who attended this morning!

We had great fun presenting our creative projects, showing off all of our hard work and tasting our Italian foods. Yum!

Here are some photos for the day! 🙂 

    Bridges 

This week we had to design, plan and carry out a simple investigation to build a bridge in small groups using lollipop sticks. We interpreted information regarding the materials used in designing a bridge through looking at various bridges around the world and in Dublin. The group that created the most stable bridge told us the strategy they used when making their bridge and we discussed strategies which may be used by an engineer in designing a bridge.

We investigated how materials can be changed by mixing and we explored the effects of heating and cooling on a range of liquids, solids and gases.

We predicted which type of chocolate (milk, dark or white) would melt the fastest and the reason for this. The girls discovered white chocolate melts the fastest as it has no cocoa solids and a high milk content while dark chocolate is the slowest to melt as it has the lowest milk content and a lot of cocoa solids.

We also made rice krispie buns to show the effects of melting a solid to a liquid and then allowing it to cool back to a solid. We all became aware that the shape of the chocolate would not form into it’s original shape as a solid once melted.

Some of our tests were not fair tests due to human error (water got into some of the cases)! However, we all enjoyed the tasty buns at the end of our work 🙂

Congratulations to all the girls in Ms Davey’s class who performed at the Laudate Festival 2019 on Tuesday, 29th of January at the Church of Our Lady of Victories. They sang and performed all 16 songs beautifully. Well done girls 🙂