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.
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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. Grade 5/6 are looking at how fertiliser works and the impact it has on growing plants. They set up experiments this week to examine this. They refreshed what a fair experiment is and made predictions on the outcome. Some classes are comparing liquid fertiliser with the slow-release kind that is sprinkled on soil, while others are looking into the effect of varying concentrations of liquid fertiliser. This term, Grade 1 and 2 are thinking about how we grow plants for food and what plants need to survive. They planted some radishes this week and we will conduct some experiments on our seedlings in the weeks to come. |
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February 2022
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