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!

Antarctic Explorers!

We were lucky enough in Tautoru to have a science lesson with Dr Natalie Robinson, Antarctic researcher and explorer. She left her desk at NIWA to talk to us about her Antarctic research. She specialises in icicles forming under the sea, and what these mean for our planets future.

It was interesting to learn all about life in Antarctica, including how many layers you have to wear to keep safe in the freezing temperatures. It never rains in Antarctica, it's much too cold for that and snow falls instead. The ice in Antarctica can reach up to 4km deep! We saw the tents that Antarctic scientists have to sleep in. There's no floor in these tents as the ice is much too cold to melt underneath them! 

Big thanks to Natalie for coming in and passing on all of this incredible knowledge.

Tāwhirimātea and the power of the wind

We have been learning about some of the Māori Atua (Gods). 

One of these is Tāwhirimātea who is the Auta of the wind.

As part of this, we have been learning about wind turbines and how they generate electricity.

We made our own mini wind turbines too. This is how we did it:

1. Take a piece of paper and fold it to make a square. 

2. Cut along the edge.

3. Colour both sides of your paper.

4. Fold your paper into two triangles to find the centre.

 

5. Put a dot in the centre and 4 dots along the folded lines. Use your fingers to measure.

6. Cut along the folds to your dot and then fold 4 edges into the centre and secure with blu tack.

7. Use a pin to secure the centre and attach it to a pencil with an eraser on the top.

You have a windmill!