Science Fair 2019

Next week our school is having a Science Fair Sharing time on Thursday next week.

Many of our children in Maunga have expressed an interest in working on individual projects at home and presenting these at our own science fair experiments and ideas.  So this post is a feedforward one to help those who are wanting to complete this at home.

So LETS MAKE IT A WEEK 7 & 8 Writing Challenge.

Feel free to comment below with any ideas or comments on what your child is doing, or comment/email us if you have any questions.

Special visitor - Dr Colin

Today we were very lucky to have a visitor come in to talk to our children.  Dr Colin brought it a selection of rocks to share and let us look at and wonder about.  This was very hands on and the kids LOVED asking questions. 

A few of the children in Team Maunga had been collecting rocks prior to him coming, so listening and asking Colin about these was fantastic.  Nakita had brought in some special rocks from home and this was exciting for the rest of the class as Colin told us all that it contained "fools gold".  

Following the visit from Colin, we wrote stories about what we wanted to do when we get older.

We had such a great morning.  

 

 

 

New Class members

This week when we arrived at school we had a 8 new team members.  This was very exciting for everyone.  Nakita and Mrs G brought in some Tadpoles that had been caught on the farm where they live.  A number of them already had legs (so are known as froglets.  One was almost a frog when it arrived. 

When they arrived we had to find some rocks in our school grounds that could be used in the tank.  We then washed this carefully before adding the tadpoles (and froglets) to the tank.  We came up with some awesome inquiry questions to research about frogs, where they come from, how they hatch, what they eat, How much they weigh and many more.  So watch this space for an update on what we learn.

Later in the week we had one almost frog that loved jumping around, so just in case it tried to jump out we went searching for something to pop over our tank.  We came back with a lovely hair net used when people are cooking at our school.  This was perfect!  After school Mrs G took it back to her house to release it back where it came from (as we have heaps more to watch).  Mrs S has a tank that she is going to set up in Room 4 as well so there will me more opportunities for Team Maunga to learn and talk about frogs.

Ohaeawai's Science Fair

Here are a few snapshots that students took of each other presenting at our recent Science Fair.  The children were fantastic presenters and got better and better as the time went on.  In the end they were making people who were coming to visit make predictions about what they though would happen when they re-did the experiment and then asked further questions about what might happen if one of the variables were changed.  Great learning

"What do you think will happen when we turn on the hair dryer?"

"What object will go the highest?"

"What would happen if we used a different setting on the hair dryer?"

"This is how we made a paper areoplane..."

"What would happen if we used different paper?"

"What would happen if we made smaller/bigger planes?" 

"What do you think will happen to the duvet when we turn the fan on?"

"What would happen if someone was inside it?"

"What would happen if Mrs G's phone was on-top of it?"

"What would happen if the hole around the fan was bigger?"

 "What will happen when we let the balloon go?"

"Does it matter how much air is inside the balloon?"

"Does it matter where we attach the balloon?"

How to Make a Paper Plane

For the last week we have been learning about air pressure. Veon wanted to make a paper plane to see what would happen to it with the pressure from different air forces. On Monday we learnt how to make a paper plane. We looked at YouTube tutorials to show us how people present instructions. Olivia, Ella, Shiah, and Kaira have put together a video explaining how to make a basic paper plane. The Hovercrafts (reading group) wrote up the steps for us on Pic Collage. Tomorrow we will try to follow these instructions to make planes to test with different air pressures, like a fan, hair dryer, or air released from a balloon. Cheyne wants to try and make different designs to see which paper plane will fly the longest distance.

Check out our video to see if you can make a paper plane. Please let us know how it goes!

Yay! Balloon Rocket Experiment

For science we have been investigating different ways to make things move using air.  This is one we did today.

Question
What will happen to the Balloon Rocket when we let it go.
Hypothesis
We think the balloon rocket will go half the distance from one of our teachers whiteboards to the orange table.
Method/Observations
First, we got some string. Second, we blew the Balloon Rocket up and then put the straw on the string and attached the balloon rocket to the straw with cello tape. Last, we let the Balloon Rocket go. Yay!! it went to the other side!!!!
Materials we used:
Balloon, string, straw and cello tape.

By Tanner & Zavier