Ākau Tangi Sports Day

Autahi and Tautoru had a great morning together on Tuesday at Ākau Tangi practising some new (and some familiar) skills as part of our physical education curriculum. 

We participated in futsal (indoor football), floorball (indoor hockey) and gymnastics. 

We are lucky to have such an excellent facility and instructors available to us. 

Here are some photo highlights...

Melting Ice

We have been looking at different states of matter.  On Wednesday we explored how an ice cube can change. 

To start with we each put a piece of ice outside and drew around it with chalk. 

We put them in a few different places - in the shade, in the sun, on a seat versus the concrete.

We had lots of questions about what might happen:

 We have learnt lots of new vocab such as condensation, vaporisation, evaporation and fusion. 

We watched over a period of time making predictions and drawing our observations.

  By the end of the day even our puddles were mostly disappeared. 

Term 4 Inquiry - Change - First Ideas & Shadows

Change...what do we know about it? 

We always start any new inquiry and provocation with our fist ideas, any idea is welcomed. 

This is what we came up with:

"If you get a puppy, it turns into a dog"

"You start off at 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 20"

"The earth spins, we move"

"People get smarter and get bigger brains"

"Chocolate can change by melting. Ice blocks can melt as well"

We also asked what we thought the difference was between a liquid, solid or gas. 

Here are some of our ideas:

Solid - pen, wall, metal, chocolate, us, wood

Liquid - melted chocolate, blood, water, acid

Gas - is like a fog coming from a pot.

We started our first experiment looking at shadows - what are they and how are they formed?

We went outside in the morning sun and drew around our buddies shadow

We thought that our shadows would change as the sun moves across the sky, but we also found out that this is because we are a solid and the suns light cannot pass through us! 

In the afternoon we went and traced around our buddies shadow again. 

We found out that they were longer as the sun moved further away in the sky and that the shadow were almost exactly a quarter turn after 4 hours. 

We predicted that if the sun was still shining in another 4 hours, it would be exactly opposite to where we started. 

Unfortunately we won't be at school at that time of the day to test our theory though!