Little Garden Plants

Each child in our class has a Little Garden plant from New World that they will be nurturing over this term. We will be doing some research around our plants as well.

Dangerous Journeys To School

We have been focussing on the setting of our writing

• colours
• shapes
• temperature
• size
• weather
• texture

Here are a few sentences based on this photo of one of the 25 most dangerous journeys to school.

Under me is a huge half hanging wet bridge that has holes in it. I can barely walk on it without falling off. By Holly

In front of me is my friend clinging on to the rusty wire, looking at her feet so she knows where to step next. Chloe

MBots

We used the amazing MBot resources from The House of Science. We tried to move the robots using a remote and then a tablet which was linked via bluetooth to the MBot. It was interesting moving the MBot - and when mistakes were made trying to reverse the last step we took instead of just picking up the robot and moving it by hand.

A project for the holidays

In class the children have been amazed by the sudden growth of our kumara. This is a great activity for children to do at home. I wonder who can grow the longest plant?

Cleaning up oil experiments

We have been trying to discover the best way to clean up an oil spill. We have tried

• absorbing, 
• dispersing 
• skimming 

This has involved getting very messy. We have also looked at the scientific experiment process - posing a question, hypothesising, going through the method, making observations, looking at the results and drawing conclusions.

We have also discussed the importance of conducting a fair test.

Keep Te Puna Tidy

We had a short walk down Te Puna Road towards Maramatanga Park and discovered so much rubbish some of our bags broke as they couldn't hold it all. The children were horrified by what they found - bottles, paper, straws, tin, even a wallet.

Litterless lunches

We have been investigating the effect of pollution in the ocean.
We have collected rubbish in our playground and realised much of it comes out of lunchboxes. Some of this rubbish ends up in drains or is blown away by all the wind we have been having lately.
We thought we could start with limiting the wrappings that we use in our lunches.
We have set a challenge to have litter free lunches. (I understand that this can be difficult at times but we are aiming to minimise our rubbish)
Here are some examples.

I also showed the children some cool litterless lunches that had been made into pieces of art. Holly decided to try some lunch art of her own

Click on the picture below to visit the websites we looked at as inspiration.