This week in the Science Room

This week was the last session for Year One.  They got to finish painting their air dry clay peg labels, finish constructing their rubberband powered boats and finish a little assessment task all about which objects float and which objects sink.

It certainly was a busy day in the science room.

This week also saw some of Year Six come down and experiment with light and shadows.  A darkened room, a torch, a couple of mirrors and suddenly there's plenty of fun to be had.  We looked at how light travels, reflection, refraction and the visible spectrum.  The class were then given a challenge to hit a target using a $2 shop laser pointer.  The challenge was that the laser beam had to be reflected three times before it could hit the target!

Fortunately, the weather stayed fine so the Year Five classes were able to get back out into the stream for some testing.  The boys learnt how to measure the stream velocity using a table tennis ball, a length of string and a stopwatch.  They also all learnt how to take a quadrat count.  We didn't have a lot of extra time so instead of measuring out a square metre, each group used a plastic hoop from the PE shed.  This was a nice, simple way of marking out a space to count the objects inside a perimeter.