For the Discover Primary Science and Maths Award, Fifth Class and Mr. Curran completed the Greenwave Section. For this, we focused on the amount of rainfall in Bray during the month of April.
After we each got our own laptop, we went on the internet and tried to find what the previous rainfall was in Bray. We found a great website called www.brayweather.com . This logged the rainfall each day online and was a great resource to us. We wanted to try and collect our own data also so we made our own rain gauges, using Coca Cola bottles. Mr. Foley helped with the cutting of the bottles.
Our rain gauges ready to go!
Each night three different boys brought a rain gauge home and measured how much rainfall there was in their own back garden. Sadly on the third night we lost one of our rain gauges when Adam’s blew away in the strong winds that night!
Following our own investigations into the rainfall, we decided to graph the official daily rainfall amounts in our copies using bar graphs.
We each had our own laptop to try and graph the rainfall in Bray.
After this, we asked could we do it on the computers. After our teacher showed us how on the interactive whiteboard, we all tried to input our data. It was much easier than we thought because Microsoft Word opens up an Excel spreadsheet for you to fill in. As we filled in the spreadsheet, we could see the data being represented on the graph immediately which was cool.
Here is Kevin using the data from www.brayweather.com to create a graph on the laptop.
After we lost a rain gauge because of the wind, we decided to also look at wind speed. We learned that an “anemometer” is used to measure wind-speed. We worked in groups and tried to decide how we could try and build our own anemometer. This was more difficult than we thought but we learned a lot from working as a team.
Archie and Jamie concentrating hard!
We needed to work together to try and put it together.
Our finished anemometer (after a lot of hard work!)
After this we used www.brayweather.com to find what the daily wind speeds were here in Bray. Again, we inputted our data into an Excel spreadsheet and made our graphs. Some boys who were finished quickly even managed to graph the daily temperature using data found on that website. Using the laptops was great fun and was very easy. It also helped make our graphs look very professional.
Another part of this section was that we had to record sightings of frogs, swallows, horsechestnut, ash, primrose and hawthorn trees from our local area. Mr. Curran was a great help to us with this. Sightings then had to be recorded on www.greenwave.ie. The best thing about this was we were able to see other sightings recorded by other schools.
The only thing that we did not find in Bray was frog spawn. The Hawthorn tree near the school broke bud on the 14th of April, while the Chestnut tree broke bud on the 4th of April. There was a Primrose seen in flower at Festine Lente in Bray on the 12th of April and two swallows were seen flying over Bray on Saturday, 6th April. All of these sightings were recorded by our teacher on the greenwave website. Fifth Class would like to say a big thank you to Mr. Curran for his help with this part of the section.
We loved getting to make our own weather instruments to help us try to see the rainfall and wind speed here in Bray. We also loved using the laptops to graph our data. Now we want to set up our own weather station in our school yard!
9:18 pm on April 29th, 2013
Mam loved it when I told her but she said there should be more pictures of me.
5:52 pm on May 15th, 2013
It was really cool doing the rainfall and wind speed on the laptops because we didn’t really do anything like that before