This week has been our science week and we’ve had a blast! All week we have been enjoying learning about the journey of Curiosity to Mars to find signs of life. This started with sharing a story book about Curiosity. From this we had loads of questions that we wanted to explore and find answers for.
We were very interested on how they would know if there was life on Mars just from soil samples. Luckily Miss Parsons had a link to NASA to find out how! We looked at 3 different Mars soil samples and observed them to see which one had signs of life. When we added water to the samples we saw that soil sample 2 started to bubble. We discussed what this meant and we all agreed that this meant there were signs of life as it was respiring. After 10 minutes we saw that sample 3 had grown in size and was almost coming out of the cup! This showed us that sample 3 also had signs of life as it had grown. We used our knowledge of MRS GREN to help us determine this.
We completed an investigation about the craters found on Mars. We wondered whether the distance an asteroid travelled affected the size of the crater. We recreated the surface of Mars with sand and used bouncy balls as the asteroid. We measured the height we dropped the ball from and then measured the craters made. After the experiment we used our data to make line graphs and analysed what we found.
We made our own Mars rover buggies out of junk material. Some of us tried to insert a working motor into our model to get the wheels moving. This was extremely difficult and we learnt loads from our challenges!
Finally, we watched a real news report that confirmed that Curiosity had made some interesting discoveries on Mars. We wrote up our own news reports and then used a green screen to film them. We had loads of fun doing this and really got in to character! Unfortunately Miss Parsons had some trouble with the microphone at times, but she’s learnt for next time!
