Haytor View

Community Primary School & Nursery

Learning together ~ enjoying success ~ aiming high ~ celebrating difference ~ enriching community

Haytor View

Community Primary School & Nursery

Learning together ~ enjoying success ~ aiming high ~ celebrating difference ~ enriching community

As part of their learning around Space and the Planets, year 2 spent the week running rocket tests on the school field.

The week started with us just firing rockets to see what happened, explaining and exploring how they worked, developing our questions and deciding how we could present any data that we collected.

Day 2 saw us trying to answer our first question “How does the amount of water in the bottle affect the distance the rocket flies?”

We decided we needed to run a fair test, changing just the amount of water with each test, to find an answer. Our understanding of fractions helped us decide how to change the amount of water we put in each rocket.

Day 3 we focused on determining which scale would be best to show people how far each rocket traveled so we all knew how much water would be best to use in our tests and then started to plan our rocket designs.

Day 4 was the creation day. The children were all given an identical plastic bottle and challenged to create a rocket that would fly furthest. we had talked about air resistance and explored why racing cars are pointy. The children really enjoyed this and created some fantastic rocket designs.

Day 5 was the testing. We all nervously waited on the field for our rockets to lift off. we got quite a shock when one flew so far, it looked like it was going to shoot over the hedge at the end of the field! The winning design was sheer simplicity, without any of the fancy fins or decorations, just the appliance of science!

We had a fantastic week of rich, challenging, exciting outdoor learning. We can’t wait to do something like this again!