Autahi and Tautoru trip to Taputeranga Marine Reserve

In both Autahi and Tautoru, we have recently been using Atua as the foundation for our Inquiry. Exploring the realms of different atua has given us rich opportunities to learn about the natural world around us. 

This week, our visit to Taputeranga Marine Reserve was full of great learning about Tangaroa and the children of Tangaroa, the creatures that inhabit our ocean habitats. The Marine Education Centre at Taputeranga is devoted to the sea life of our local coastline so we were learning about creatures that we can find around Worser Bay, too.

Here is a selection of photos from our trip to give a flavour of what we saw. Doctor Victor encouraged us to be explorers, find out new things, and ask lots of questions - and we did!

Visiting the Bait House

Here, we had the chance to get hands-on with some sea stars, anemones, kina, crabs and other creatures.

Doctor Victor showed us how to use our hands like scoops to very gently pick up the animals so that we could take a closer look at them without harming them.

A cushion star and a big sea star.

This beauty is a snake star. We had to be extra-careful when picking it up to make sure we were supporting its body and legs from underneath.

Rockpooling

We also had to chance to explore the rock pools beside the Bait House. Look what we found!

How cute is this little crab?

And how lucky are we to get to spend time learning together and having fun in this beautiful spot?

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!