On Monday 11 September the whole school was treated to a visit from a Mad Scientist in assembly, before years 3 and 4 had a workshop linked to the current topic 'What Lies Beneath Us?'.

We were shown how the earth is similar to a boiled egg - who would have thought it? This is because if you cut across the egg, the shell, albumen and yolk look like the three layers of the earth - the crust , mantle and core. We had some rather large guesses about how wide the earth was, but finally learned that the crust is between 3 and 25 miles thick, compared to the Earth's diameter, which is approximately 10,000 miles across. This means that the part we live on is actually quite thin.

We also learned that there are rocks all around us and that these can be one of three types; metamorphic, sedimentary and igneous. Each of the three types is made in different ways. By heat, pressure or a mixture of both and they all have different properties.Next, we went outside and did some prospecting - sieving sand to find hidden gems. These were very colourful and everyone had some examples they took home in their own gem pouch.

Our next activity was trying to smash a piece of geode to reveal the crystal inside. Some groups fared better than others, but in the end, using a rubber mallet and lots of muscles we managed to break the geode and everyone tooka  piece of crystal to add to their collection.

Our grand finale was to create our own volcano. Using a pack of mentoes and bottle of cola, we created an eruption in the playground.

Now we will be seeing how all this learning fits into our topic. As you can see from the photos below, the children really enjoyed their learning.

{besps}classes/y4/mad{/besps}