The Grade 3/4 students are building bridges. Their goal is to make the strongest bridge that costs the least amount of (imaginary) money. They have made detailed plans, worked out which materials they want to use and created spreadsheets with formulas to keep track of the quantities of materials they have purchased and how much it is costing them.
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This week, the Grade 1/2 students started thinking about properties of materials. They had to examine samples of different fabrics, list some properties and give a suggestion for what that particular type of fabric could be used to make. The Grade 1/2 students made clouds in jars last week. They had warm/hot water in the bottom of their jar with a lid on the top so their steam didn't escape. They placed an ice cube on the top to model how the temperature gets lower the further up in the sky you go. The steam condensed into tiny drops of water on the underside of the plastic lid.
Grade 5 and 6 have been thinking about water. They are learning about why it has a high surface tension, or why "it likes to stick to itself". The Grade 1 and 2s have been talking about evaporation. They made puddles outside and traced them using chalk so they knew how big they were when they started. At the end of the session, they checked on their puddles to see how much they had evaporated away. The Grade 3s and 4s are learning about electricity. They made (very tiny amounts of) electricity in four different ways. After our radish experiment outside was snacked upon by caterpillars, Grade 3/4 had a big discussion about the merits of greenhouses. They made models of greenhouses. First they drew a plan to follow and carefully considered what materials they would make their model out of. Some of the materials that greenhouses are made out of in the real world are not appropriate for school so students had to think about alternative materials that would represent the ones used in real life. Once they had completed their plan, they created their model greenhouse. Now that the Preps have gotten used to the routine in the Discovery Room and have had a short explainer about what each of the four fields of STEM actually are, they are ready to join the rest of the school in investigating our concept for the term - Caring for Populations. They are learning about how we look after human, plant and animal populations. They will be mostly focusing on plants. They will learn about how they grow and change, what they need for survival and how humans use them as food, building materials and to make clothes. Of course, to do that they need some actual plants to study, so this week, they planted some radish seed for us to track over the remainder of term. As part of our topic of Caring for Populations, the Grade 3/4s were presented with the hypothetical situation of a zombie apocalypse. As a band of survivors living in the school ground, student had to work their way through the problem of surviving long term. Each of the classes eventually realised that food would be a big issue and thought that turning one or both of the ovals into a farm would be better than eating canned food. This led to much discussion about whether the quality of soil on the ovals would be good enough to grow plants on so the students have been experimenting to find out. Using the abandoned garden beds behind the canteen, students planted some radish seeds in the poor quality soil there as well as some seeds in fresh potting mix to act as their control. |
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February 2022
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