Saturday 6 December 2014

Tripping the Light Fantastic with Upton Heath Chester

 We had a wonderful time on Thursday with Upton Heath primary school in Chester exploring light and colour through our show Inside the Rainbow.
This show is probably our favourite because it is so lovely to watch expressions of the children as they enter a darkened room full of so many different sorts of lights - disco balls splashing coloured light across the ceiling, fibre optic lamps shimmering, a lava lamp is slowly glooping away, the plasma ball is doing it's thing looking so exciting......
Everyone wants to peep into the darkened hall to see what is happening!!


The first show was with year 1 and 2 who came in so quietly trying very hard to contain their excitement when they saw how amazing the room looked.
This show is such a lovely experience - after feeling so warm and glowing in all this light we turn off everything and realise how different it feels to be in the dark and how little we can actually see. Helen and I are dressed for the occasion and we light up our  EL outfits and uncover our glow bracelets and suddenly we are having a wonderful time playing with all sort of gadgets and gizmos that use light.


We all made huge shadows and kept some on a special shadow sheet.
We explored the rainbow using our amazing glasses and then found out that some insects can see beyond the rainbow in Ultraviolet so we used our special lights to show secret messages.
Helen helped some excited volunteers to set fire to special chemicals and show how how fireworks are coloured and then Sue made a spectacular sparkler with some extra fine iron filings



We bounced light around the room using mirrors, used our muscles to make torches light up and the teachers lit up special tubes using our plasma ball.

All to soon it was time to leave for break.
Waiting at the door of the hall were  a group of reception children who were almost squeaking they were so excited because this was an unexpected extra - a short session with us playing with the toys, dressing up in the EL lights and wearing the rainbow glasses. We got lots of hugs as they left.......


After break we were much more serious with year 2 and 3.....well a little bit! Similar show but with a bit more added science explanation

In the afternoon we worked with year 3 who are studying light and colour right now.
We looked at how with just three colours we can make a whole rainbow - the wonderful coloured patterns they created will make great displays.

We made our own secret messages using two different special pens - one that we revealed using another pen and then we wrote messages that needed the UV light the reveal them.




Finally in small groups we made special lava lamps in deep red  that we lit up to make a super display and one group helped us to make a little video clip







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