Claude Monet

We are studying Claude Monet, at first we did not like his paintings, but the more we have studied him, the more amazing they are. Niamh and I will be doing a Monet style painting of our own. Hopefully we can go to Paris to visit his famous garden where he painted all his waterlilly paintings, and all the pond paintings with the Japanese bridge.

The tadpoles emerge!

There was huge excitement in the house today as some of the tadpoles begin to emerge.

Here is one at the bottom of the new tank. He did not swim around immediately as we would have thought, making us think that he is not doing well with the fresh water we put in his tank (even though it is treated to remove all the chemicals). Tomorrow we will go and get water from the pond and see if they will do better in that water (as well as get some more eggs, just in case these one's die because of the new water).

We are studying the life cycle of a frog!

We went off on a trip to find frogspawn today in Bushy park. It did not take too long before we found a clump of jellied frogspawn floating on top of the water, it was in an offshoot pond of a mainpond. We were all sooooo excited to find it, especially after Eden had said there was no way anything would be living in that disgusting water.

The mass of jellied frogspawn that we took our eggs from.
Holding up the jar of 13 eggs. We noticed one of the egg sacs are damaged so we think already that that one won't survive.
A little distance on we came across another little pond, and were astounded that there were literally thousands of eggs on top of the water, all in various stages of development, some looked just about ready for tadpoles to emerge, they were mostly black with very little egg sac around.
Our eggs arrived home safe and sound.

People sketches

Top one by Niamh, bottom one by Jude.

Sketches of people

by Eden

Learning about cells

We loved exploring the different parts of a cell on this website we came across:

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/insideacell/

Experiments with skin - receptors and nerve endings Part 1

In this experiment mom used a piece of wire that had two points. We were blindfolded and had to tell mom if we could feel one or two points on the top of our hand. If the points were close together on the top of our hand we could only feel one point. Mom then moved the points wider and wider apart until we could feel both points. There are not many nerve receptors on the top of our hands and so when the points are close together, we can't feel both, it is only when they are moved further apart that another receptor can feel the point.

No matter how close the points are on our fingertips, we could always feel the two points, this is because there are much more receptors on our fingertips.
The top of our feet could also not feel two points until they were moved further apart. Not many receptors here either.