More Big Questions

There are always Big Questions coming up, but we try to give them a little time on Thursdays in 4G. After we'd looked back at one or two of the questions from last time, we had some more to ask:

We discussed Maia's and Tobias' questions, and wondered what it was that made humans so different from other animals, that we have a history, that while our bodies haven't changed much since the time of the cavemen our culture has. Humans are unique like that. Why is that?

Pablo thought it was because of our hands, and there's a lot of sense in that. Animals like cats and dogs can't really hold things because all their four limbs end in feet. We have hands, and so we can use tools!

Of course there's a lot more to it than that. What do you think? How did cavemen learn how to learn? And where does language fit into all this? Any answers?

Big Questions

The last few Thursdays we've made a little time for some big questions that have come up, and some more that have come to join them.

We haven't had time to answer them all. Some of them would be very hard to answer. So, for now, we just asked the questions.

For Ryan's question, we did a bit of Googling. We just asked the question and here's one answer we found on the ESA site. It says there are about 10¹² stars in the Milky Way. 10¹² means 1 with twelve zeroes after it. That's 1,000,000,000,000. The Milky Way is a galaxy, a bit like this one:

Each little speck of light is a star.

The website then says there are 10¹² galaxies in the Universe. So, 1,000,000,000,000 galaxies.

We multiply those together and we get 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the Universe! That's called a septillion, and it's a lot more stars than we guessed at first!

We also began to look at Cristina's question, and strayed into secondary school territory, talking about elements. Here's a song we looked at:

We've got a lot more big questions:

and still more to come...

Do you have any answers to any of these big questions?

Do you have any questions of your own?

Ryan's Island

Pablo's Island

Mimi's Island

Jacques' Island

Alicia's Island

How is that possible?

While 4B have been busy rehearsing for their assembly, children in 4G have been looking at dragon poems, starting with Mimi and Pablo's dragon poems on this blog.

We also read a book Mimi was inspired by - Tell Me A Dragon - which Miss Ash had shared back in Year 2.

Then we looked at Brian Patten's poem, A Small Dragon. It starts with this verse:

I’ve found a small dragon in the woodshed.

Think it must have come from deep inside a forest

because it’s damp and green and leaves

are still reflecting in its eyes.

We answered comprehension questions on the poem. One of the questions was, "How is it possible that leaves are still reflecting in his eyes?"

We answered on a Padlet wall:

See the Padlet wall on Padlet

I particularly liked Jacques' answer:
"Because everything is possible in a poet's mind and in MY WORLD EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE."

Pebble Questions

We each brought a pebble to school. Here are some of the questions we came up with to ask about our pebbles.

We've used a microscope to look closer at each pebble.




For guidance, we had the "Seven Ws" in mind: