Churchill Science

Playgrounds are fun for kids, but they also follow the laws of physics. We’ve been learning about gravity and friction and simple machines with 202!

For our end-of-unit project, we designed our own playgrounds. We’ll post those photos soon. In the meantime, here’s a short video about the Imagination Playground in a Box:

205, 203 and 206 are learning about the forest. While we were watching Planet Earth and noticing the different layers of the forest, we pointed out many predators and their prey. We also began to talk about how plants make their own energy from the Sun, while everything else that lives must eat to get its energy.

Follow the energy to win the food chain game!

Click the pictures to play.

Click here to play!

This is a fun game for young children to learn about life cycles. 225 played this game in science class!

This is a type of bird. It says "drink your tea!" Click on this picture to play the game.

This game is about nature. It is about the forest. You can see lots of amazing animals. You can learn about the top of the tree, the middle, the bottom, and even the inside and top of a log. One of the best ones is a bird that says, “Drink your tea!!” You will experience the life of nature. This game is amazing.

by Room 203

205 and 206 also played this game!

We can’t get enough of this game! Can you balance out the predators and prey so that all three kinds of living things survive?

If you think you know the answer to this one, leave a comment!

Leave a comment if you think you know!

The LCROSS mission is a search for water on the moon. The LCROSS mission is going to do this by sending a rocket crashing into the moon causing a big impact and creating a crater, throwing tons of debris and potentially water ice and vapor above the lunar surface.

More about it:

Everybody’s favorite ringed planet is in the news again!

Science in progress… This is how Lisa spent a little of her summer vacation.

Pretty amazing. It seems that everywhere we look in the solar system, there are things to surprise us. The speaker in this video is a little hard to understand, but he said something very interesting – that the salt in the water, plus other discoveries they made, mean that there are the right chemicals for possibly creating life. Forget life on other planets – we should be looking for life on other moons!

Happy 40th Anniversary to Apollo 11. Forty years ago today, we landed humans on the Moon for the very first time.

It’s the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Click on the picture to visit wechoosethemoon.org, an interactive website that is tracking the mission as though it were happening right now. It features audio, photos, and videos.

After June 20th, the site will stay up and you will be able to click through the entire mission from start to finish.

During yesterday’s launch, the space shuttle suffered some damage. Some foam tiles, which protect the shuttle from burning up when it enters Earth’s atmosphere, have fallen off or were scuffed. So far, as this news report says, NASA doesn’t know how much damage there is. There are also different options for fixing the damage if it turns out to be a big problem.

Try rubbing your hands together very fast – you can feel the heat building up. This is what happens when a flying object like a spaceship lands on a planet or moon with an atmosphere. The ship rubs against the air in the atmosphere and a LOT of heat is built up. This is because of a force called friction. It’s super-important to have a heat shield so that the ship won’t burn up. A few years ago, the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed because of damage to its heat shield.