2nd Class had a wonderful tour of some TU Dublin buildings on the Grangegorman campus. We were guided around the student services building, which was previously a hospital. We also got to visit another building from the 1800s which was once used as a jail! These have been fully renovated and we discussed the materials and processes used in this, as well as their current purposes.

We finished our tour with an informative talk on the physics of building and a practical activity where we used arches and a cornerstone to construct a wall in groups. A big thank you to Ian Roller who was our fabulous facilitator throughout!

We had a busy week in 2nd Class last week.

In science, we were experimenting with balloons and straws and observing how sound waves vibrate and travel through different mediums. It was noisy, but fun!

We also designed, constructed, tested and decorated our own string phones. We even had a working landline between the two 2nd classes!

And we continued looking at Games in the Past in History, exploring some real-life games from the past.

Second Class have been learning about the science of sound this week. We learned that sound is vibration that travels in waves through matter and we can hear this with our ears. We can’t see these waves but to test they are there, we used sound to make rice dance!

We made drums using bowls and cling film (we discovered the tighter the better) and placed the bowls next to speakers. Then we played a synthesizer sound through the speaker. Different volume and pitch (or frequencies) made the rice dance more or less, sometimes even dancing off the drum completely! We also got to have a go of a synthesizer. We had lots of fun with sound!

Mr Donnelly and Ms Leonard’s classes had a wonderful trip to Cabra Library today. Clodagh welcomed us in and read us a lovely story about exploring. Then she answered some of our questions about the library.

We did some of our own exploring and looked around the children’s section of the library. We found so many cool books and had a brilliant time finding out about fiction and non-fiction titles.

There is a Halloween colouring competition that we can enter and parents are always welcome to Cabra Library to set up a free account for their child.

Thanks again to Clodagh and Sarah for organising this trip.