A taste of the rainforest - in Somerset

Last week saw the first (annual?!) Rainforest Day at my local first school - and, of course, I was invited!

Well. I say "invited"... More that I needed to spend another day in school prior to my next interview, and I desperately wanted to be involved in Rainforest Day - so just like that things were organised at the last minute! I was very grateful that I'd even been given my own slot during the day to run my own activity. I would've liked to have found something explosive & dramatic to do, but that's not the easiest thing within the rainforest theme! In the end I settled on a taste test.

The background to the day was an aim to raise money in order to sponsor an acre of rainforest; I was very pleasantly surprised to see how interested the whole class seemed to be in the subject. It really captured their imagination! So they all came in dressed as explorers and paid £1 for the privilege - think Indiana Jones hats & camouflage gear!!

First we made a start on the display: a board & a 'log' made to look like our very own rainforest. It started off like this (once we'd decided on the background):

The children were given the choice of making playdough flowers to decorate the log, or a variety of sheets with rainforest animals/insects/plants on them to colour in & cut out. Centipedes, millipedes, army ants, butterflies, flowers, venus flytrap, leaves, lizards, jaguars...

So once we'd made a start on that, it was over to me for the food. Thankfully they were quite familiar with the names of a lot of the food I talked to them about to begin with - and most were more than happy to have a go at tasting the array of foods I'd brought in for them! They did a great job of filling in the sheets I'd made, asking them to come up with a description of each food (appearance, smell, taste, texture) - and a few of them even knew what most of the foods were! I think I got most areas covered with peppers (red & yellow), mango, grapefruit & macadamia nuts... Clearly not everyone was going to like everything, but I think I got a decent effort out of the whole class!

Finally for my turn, I got some volunteers (again, a surprising amount!) to do some blind taste tests. The banana and coconut were both easily recognised, but the passionfruit had them foxed! I did really enjoy running that whole session. It's a shame that I can't share some of the pictures here - they made some very funny faces!

I'd also devised another fundraising scheme over the holidays - 'Name That Lemur'! 100 names (50 male, 50 female) to choose from, at 20p a go. At the time of writing a reasonable number of names have been sold, but we're hopeful of raising a lot more money from it! And the great thing is I'm the only one who knows the answer...

After lunch myself & the wonderful TAs concentrated on sorting out the display, which looked a bit like this:


...whilst the children did some work on logging. They had a sheet with a storyboard of 6 stages of deforestation, which they had to put in the right order; thankfully most recognised that you had to look at the amount of animals as well as the number of trees at each stage!

They had also been learning about the primates that live in rainforests (especially those such as the beautiful orangutan, like my adopted Sen), so the last thing was to colour in pictures of monkeys & apes from certain parts of the world: South East Asia, South America & Africa. There was a massive world map on which we coloured areas with rainforests - the plan is to stick all of the primates on to show where they live.

So that was that! Another tiring & draining day over. Now to see what Warwick think of me...

Alka-Seltzer Rocket Man

So, Science Week has come and gone. In the end I decided to go for the simple fun of the Alka-Seltzer rockets!

Because film canisters are so hard to come by these days I had to wait until about half an hour before the experiments were due to begin to test out the methods... We had a choice between Alka-Seltzer + water and baking powder + vinegar - because I didn't want to get stinky vinegar over me before the whole thing started I only tested the Alka-Seltzer rockets, and that was less than inspiring. Not looking good early on! But no time to change things.

I've spent a lot of time with this particular class over the last year and a half, but they were very surprised when they came back to the classroom and saw me there in my lab coat! Naturally there were quite a lot of questions (mainly about exploding things!), and I think they were quite excited when I said I'd studied Science at uni.

To start with I decided we should stay in the warm and check how much they knew already; I was quite impressed that a few of them knew about carbon dioxide, and could tell me about how baking powder works. They were also pretty good at describing what was going on in the glasses when I tried the two combinations out for them all to see. So a promising beginning!

The fun part began when we went outside and did some demonstrations... Varying success, but it worked more often than not - and definitely got a few laughs when it took off quicker than expected!

The challenge that we set them was to get the rockets taking off as close to 60 seconds as possible. I'm not sure that they really understood the effects of changing the different variables - even when I kept asking if they were sure that what they wanted to do was right! They probably were just enjoying themselves too much to think about all the science going on! And if it gets them interested in the subject, then who am I to complain?

Before we froze to death outside we just had enough time to make a baking powder & vinegar volcano too!

The last thing they had to do was a brief write-up of the 'experiment'; some of them were more worried about drawing the rockets well than getting on with writing, but I'm quite capable of chivvying children along! Long words and everything!

It may have just been a short time spent in school (ideally I'd have liked to have come in on a few more occasions to see other experiments), but it was definitely worthwhile - and very encouraging seeing how interested they all were in it. Especially when one boy told me he has a chemistry set at home! There's a long way to go, but hopefully there's a handful of future scientists in Somerset...

Try it yourself! All you need is:

Alka-Seltzer tablets

Water

Film canisters (or similar)

Initially try filling the canister about two thirds of the way up, and add a quarter of a tablet.

Make sure you add the tablet quickly, put the lid on and turn it upside down.

Time how long it takes to lift off - and alter variables accordingly.