Statue of Liberty

I found that New York is a very nice place.

There are lots of amazing buildings in New York like the empire state building.

I found out about the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to America.
France gave America the Statue of Liberty to show the friendship between them.

You are allowed to walk into the Statue of Liberty.

There is a smaller copy of the Statue of Liberty in Paris.

It is the same but much smaller.

Aurora Borealis

I would love to see the Aurora Borealis.  It is an amazing, natural display where mysterious, multi-coloured lights appear; twisting and turning in the night sky. 

Perhaps you have already seen it?  It is sometimes called the Northern Lights because it appears in the Arctic - which is in the north.  People further south have been lucky enough to see them too.



          Here is a photo taken in Cumbria 
          (which is in the UK).






The lights are formed from fast-moving, electrically charged particles that come from the sun. These are driven towards the poles by the Earth’s magnetic field – their varying colours are a result of the different gases in the upper atmosphere.  They hang above the planet in an oval-shaped halo in the northern hemisphere.



The best places to go and see the Aurora Borealis are from the snowy wilds of Canada and Alaska but Iceland or northern Scandinavia (Lapland) are also good viewing spots.

Here it is possible to see the lights from late September to early April.

If I could go anywhere in the world, I would go to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta, Canada to see the Aurora Borealis!

What is a volcano?

The two classes got together to come up with questions about volcanoes:

You might see them better on the MindMup app:

Volcanoes on MindMup

After that we worked in pairs to come up with some kind of definition.
Here are some of 4G's:


In 4B we worked on a definition together:

A volcano is a mountain that erupts spitting out scorching lava.

Volcano Alert!

What would you grab if you were given no warning and only had two minutes to pack a bag? In Year 4 we did just that! We asked parents to surprise their children with the instruction that they had to evacuate quickly and that they didn't know when they would be returning home. Without parental help, the children made their choices about what they would take with them, with some surprising and not-so-surprising results! Here we are showing our partner just what was in our bag:

 





Here is a closer look at the contents of some of our bags:

We had a lot of fun sharing this experience with each other.

Volcanoes on Skye

Have a look at this map of the world from 65 million years ago:

What do you notice that's different to now?
What about India?
How about Europe and America?
The Atlantic Ocean was still opening up, like this:

In the summer Mr Gregg went to the island of Skye in Scotland:

You can see it here on this map:
The rock on Skye is mostly from volcanoes. What remains of the volcanoes makes up the Cuillin mountains.

Here's Mr Gregg on Skye:

And here's a longer TV program about the same place:

Building a volcano

Miss Whittaker is working with us to make a volcano.

She made the chicken-wire structure, and we're sticking on and smoothing strips of modrock to make a surface.