Lunar Eclipse tomorrow night - Tuesday

Keeping my fingers crossed and the cloud goes so that we can watch the lunar eclipse tomorrow night.
It's happening early so would be perfect for Wellesley students to be able to watch it happen.

You'll be able to see the moon rise from around 6pm, and it will then move within the earth's shadow to be eclipsed by 7.08pm.

Here's a New Zealand Herald article explaining it in a little more detail.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11236725

If the cloud doesn't clear, then you can watch it here.

Lego Robotics is up and running

At last, whole classes have started having sessions learning how to use the Lego Mindstorms NXT's.

Instantly the classes enjoyed learning the simple programming challenges and it was great to see them having a play of their own and adding sounds and other extra's to their robots.

Looking forward to more classes enjoying robotics.

Let there be Light!

This week we finished off our lessons about light and colour.  Some of the Year 6 classes finished making their colour spinners and I was surprised at how much they enjoyed playing around with the colours to see what would happen.  Following the simple pattern from a website they were easily able to divide the circle into segments and then attached their paper to an old CD.  Using a hot glue gun, they then glued a marble into the centre.

We then learnt about refraction and did a few experiments using a glass of water and different objects.

After sharing our ideas, the boys then explored what happens when light travels through convex and concave lenses.  It was a sunny day, and boys being boys, a couple of them just couldn't help themselves with a lens, some sunlight and some paper...  Needless to say, we didn't want the smoke alarms going off and didn't want to encourage anything that could lead to a fire!

Boat Building

With the fine weather we've made the most of the good conditions and have based lots of our science outside.
The juniors have all been looking at floating and sinking and then building simple rubber band powered boats from bottles and attaching dowling and a paddle so that they can wind them up and watch them go.  It was really great to watch the year one's work out that it mattered which way they wound their paddle!

Year One's having lots of fun!

7N and 7M have been working on a boat unit within their classroom and then they each spent a day in the science and technology room constructing their own sail boats.  Once they were all finished some serious racing was had on the school pool - I'm sure there are some future boat designers in the two classes!

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.