To celebrate World Water Day on Tuesday 22nd March, we thought about how we are able to get clean and safe water from our taps whenever we want to but we found out that this is not the case for millions of people around the world, who have to travel long distances to find clean drinking water.

Our Tinkering challenge this term was not to build something, but instead the children had to pick from a selection of containers and work in teams to decide which would be the best container to carry the most water around our obstacle course without spilling it!

The children were given a plan of the course and then worked together to decide on the best container, thinking about how heavy it would be to carry and how much water it might hold. Once they had chosen their container they used a measuring jug to fill it, counting in millilitres to find the capacity and adding up the total. They then decided who would complete each part of the course.

They were amazing at being Bee Learners- talking to each other and planning how they would complete it and all the children decided that the thing that worked best today was their teamwork skills!

After lunch we measured the total amount of water left in the containers and found out which team had the most left at the end. The children were able to use their mathematical skills to measure in millilitres and litres, read scales and apply their knowledge of counting in tens to counting in hundreds and thousands! They were also fantastic scientists- predicting the outcome before doing the experiment, reading the data they had collected and evaluating how it went, thinking about what they might do differently next time.
We had lots of fun in the sunshine and luckily we didn’t get too wet!
We are going to keep the water we saved to water the plants in our outdoor areas throughout the term.

Fantastic Tinkering Sycamore Class!