Ransboro National School, Sligo

On Friday 24th September 6th class visited the newly refurbished Northwest  Hospice.

It is a very bright, colourful and friendly place.

A nurse called Hazel met us and brought us into the ward. Here she talked to us about the patients who come to stay in the hospice. She explained that the hospice is not only for cancer patients but also for other patients with long term illnesses.

We also learned that they have a home care team who visit some patients at home who prefer to be at home with their families.

We presented the hospice with a cheque for €700 that we rasied in school from our hospice coffee morning.

We used an app on our iPod Touches called 10,000 Science Facts. We wrote down five science facts that we found out from the app into our copies. Here are some of the facts that we found out:

• Chickens are 75% water
• All babies are colour blind when they are born
• One out of every four million lobsters are blue
• An asteroid can destroy earth but it can’t harm Jupiter
• Eating an apple adds five minutes to a person’s life
• When an astronaut returns to earth from space, he can be up to two inches taller
• The strongest bone in your body is the thigh bone and it is hollow
• You can get 400 Quarter Pounder burgers from one cow
• A butterfly has 12,000 eyes
• A bee must visit 4,000 flowers to get one tablespoon of honey
• Men are six times more likely to be struck by lightning than women
• A pineapple is a berry and used to be called an anana
• Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, his mother’s maiden name was “Moon”
• 27% of dogs and 7% of cats snore
• A bird’s heart beats 400 times a minute when resting and 1000 times a minute when flying
• A baby doesn’t have tears until it is six or eight weeks old
• The smallest dinosaur egg found is 3cm long
• 87% of a raw apple is water.
• Elephants are afraid of mice
• Bees can travel 4,000,000 miles at 7mph on the energy it would obtain from 1 gallon of nectar
• A duck has three eyelids
• 75% of wild birds die before reaching six months old
• 100,000 earthquakes can be felt every year
• Jellyfish were born 650 million years before dinosaurs and sharks

Rang II

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Rang III

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We had a discussion about all sorts of rules in the world. We talked about if we needed rules or not. We talked about how useful and important  rules were. We decided that if there weren’t rules we would not get along in class and life would be dangerous. We each wrote three rules for our classroom on a sheet of paper. We wrote all of the rules on the computer and made five rules out of them all. These are the five class rules we came up with:

1. Be Kind and don’t be a bully

2. Try not to leave someone out and share with each other

3. Work quietly, listen in class and don’t distract others

4. Be honest and respect each other

5. Try your best and put your hand up to answer

By Rang II & Rang III

For homework we interviewed our mum, dad, aunt or grandparents to find out what their life was like when they were younger. We found out lots of interesting facts about their life. Here are some of the things that we discovered:

• My granny told me about boxty which was a type of food treat (Leah)
• My granny’s favourite thing to do was cycle (Joshua)
• My dad liked playing Roll the Dice (Amy)
• My granny dropped my mum off at school but she had to walk three miles home (Jack)
• My granny told me that she had to walk to school (Caoimhe B)
• My dad told me that before he went to school he had to bring out the cows for milking (Fiona)
• My dad had to walk to school but his older brother went on the bus (Sarah)
• My mum told me that she played football, basketball and hurling when she was young (Sophie-Leigh)
• My granny told me that her favourite game when she was younger was hopscotch (Eilis)
• My granny’s favourite song was “Óró Mo Bháidín” (Caoimhe O)
• My mum’s favourite game was Red Rover (Maeve)
• My aunt’s favourite singer was Joe Dolan (Ellen)
• My dad’s favourite game was hide and go seek (Lynne)
• My mum’s favourite game was playing with a hula hoop (Stephen)
• My mum’s favourite song when she was young was “This Old Man” (Jim)
• My dad had to wear wellies going to school because the yard was muddy (Ciara Mc)
• When my dad was younger his favourite song was “Help” by the Beatles (Aidan D)
• My dad’s favourite song when he was younger was “We Will Rock You” by Queen (Ciara L)
• My mum had to wear a black dress and a grey jumper to school (Eimear)
• My granny lived on a farm when she was younger (Aaron)
• My granny wore skirts and jumpers in the winter and summer dresses in the summer (Caoilfhionn)
• My mum got to wear anything she wanted to school (Sam)

By Rang II and III

Today we talked about what sort of food goes off. We looked at a science book and we saw pictures of all different types of foods that have gone off. There was a picture of peaches and one had a mould on it. We talked about preserving food. You can preserve food by putting salt on it, by pickling it, by freezing it, by keeping it airtight or by tinning it. We use our senses to see if food is gone off.

We found out that before we buy milk it has been heated to kill some of the germs. This makes it safe for us to drink. Then milk must be kept in the fridge so that it will stay fresh. When milk goes off there is a thick layer of yellow skin at the top.

We are doing an experiment to see how food goes off. We have put food on the window sill in the classroom to see which ones go off. We have apple, bread, ham, cracker, cheese, milk, grape, pepper and yogurt. Already the milk is starting to smell funny and the ham is going yellow.

By Sam & Eimear (Rang II)