Making Spinning Tops

This week we were able to visit Mr Lamb in the Hard Materials room in Secondary. He helped us to make an old fashioned toy spinning top. We learnt how to use a junior hack saw, hammer with a mallet and smooth the top with a file. Look at the concentration on our faces.

Celebrating the soft Gg sound

Wow - soft g is a very yummy letter. We were treated to gingerbread, gingernut cookies, gelato and ginger. Mrs Lill made gingerbread men and we got to decorate them. Thank you everyone.

Science - We borrowed a gyroscope from the Physics department in the secondary school and watched how we could make it spin very fast. When it was spinning we could balance it on an edge or on a small point. Aeroplanes and the Mars rover have gyroscopes inside them.

Celebrating the Letter Gg

Today our tamariki tried gherkin dip, grapes, gogi berries and green popcorn. Thank you so much to the parents that send things along for us to try.

We read the story Green Eggs and Ham.....

"Would you eat green eggs and ham?" 

"I do not like green eggs and ham!"

"Try them, try them and you may."

Our tamariki have a great attitude to trying new things. 

Science - gas

We talked about how our we breathe in Oxygen and breathe out Carbon Dioxide and how sometimes our bodies produce a little extra gas that when it escapes we have to say "pardon me."

We are getting very good at observing 

- that's what good scientists do!

For todays experiment we mixed some common kitchen items together that have chemical reactions that produce Carbon Dioxide gas. Try this at home....fill a balloon with baking soda and put some vinegar into a bottle. Stretch the balloon over the neck of the bottle then lift the balloon up so that the baking soda mixes with the vinegar. Watch what happens. Try it with other ingredients too.

 

During discovery time our Room 8 buddies set up a variety of great games for us to try. We learnt to follow rules and take turns.

Gracias Room 8.

Pi Day

Today we celebrated Pi Day. We found out that Pi is a very cool number. We learnt big words like diameter and circumference. 

Pi is 3.141592653589323......

Year 10 Maths Buddies

During the week Miss Gibbs and her Year 10 Maths class came to visit us. We were given a small box of Smarties and we counted, organised, discussed and graphed them. We found that some boxes had 11 in them and others had 14. Some of us didn't think that it was fair, so we have written to Nestle to ask why this is. Hopefully they will write back.

Celebrating the letter Oo.

We ate a variety of wonderful food that begins with O. Look at the long line of tamariki that were keen to try olives! We really enjoyed the orange jelly and oat biscuits too.

For Science this week we made Oobleck. To try this at home you need approximately 1.5 cups of cornflour and a cup of water. Oobleck is a name invented by Dr Suess. It is a non-Newtonian substance that is both a solid(when under pressure) and a liquid (when it is not under pressure). It has similar properties to quick sand and liquifaction.

Our room 7 buddies made obstacle courses for us to try out and celebrate the letter Oo. It was fun going on, out and over things. We had so much fun!

Celebrating the letter Aa

We have found out that 'a' has a short sound in words like apple and avocado and a long sound in apricot and aoli. Thank you to the wonderful parents that sent along something for us to eat that starts with the letter a.

During fruit snack time the children have been getting excited about the variety of apples they have.

Science - a is for air pressure

Try this experiment at home. Put a glass bottle in the refrigerator for an hour. Wet a coin and place it on the top. Put your warm hands on the cold bottle and observe what happens. Add a comment to the blog with your observations.

We discovered that the molecules in cold air are closer together. When they are warmed up they move around and take up more space. The coin lifted because the warm air needed more space than was in the bottle.