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.

Sounds all Around

We had two very noisy and very fun sessions with Year One a couple of weeks ago.

We spent the sessions exploring sound.  What is it? How does it travel? How is it made?

After making sounds and sharing our ideas about sounds and how they travel, boys were put into pairs and each pair got to make their own string telephones.  I can remember doing this in my childhood so it was fun to do this activity with our five year olds.  After taking much care not to tangle the strings, each pair were able to make their phone and have a go at speaking and listening using it.  The important part was to make sure they kept their string tight.

We also experimented making sounds with different objects and parts of our bodies.  It was great to see the boys realise that sound involved some sort of movement and vibrations.  We looked at different musical instruments and completed some experiments using drums and rice bubbles!

To finish off, we made simple flutes using drinking straws.  The boys thought the 'duck call' sounds were hilarious - and even more so when we cut small holes for their fingers to cover, just like a simple recorder. Then they were sent back to class to share their small flutes with their classroom teacher...

Listen Hear!

This term saw the Year One class exploring and investigating concepts based around the theme of sound.  They had lots of fun making their own telephone and working out what was the best way for the sound to travel along the string.

All of the boy got to play with tuning forks, water and various objects and it didn't take long for them to start talking about vibrations, sound travelling and 'wigglying sounds'.