Science investigation with water and salt

We investigated what would happened if we carefully added dye to water - first to plain water and secondly to water with salt added, that is a saturated salt solution.

We had to practise our close observation skills and really think about what we were seeing.
We were surprised by the different results.

Butterfly Hospital

We were surprised to find one lone chrysalis in our Butterfly Garden late in Autumn.  Unfortunately the chysalis dropped from its branch as the butterfly was emerging.  The butterfly's wings were bent over and unable to dry out properly so we very carefully brought it into Room 19 to dry out.

Writing exemplar

After our trip to the Maritime Museum, everyone wrote about something special they had experienced.   Aasher's was chosen as an exemplar and displayed on the writing wall as his work showed us how to improve our own writing.  The display shows how Aasher checked the success criteria and then revisited his first draft to improve it.  Thank you, Aasher, your exemplar will help us all be better writers.

Mothers' Day flowers

For Mothers' Day, we gave our mums a flower, but not just any flower - a flower that we had created specially!  First we made different coloured solutions in test tubes, using dye from our art cupbaord.  Then we placed the white flowers in the test tubes.  The flowers sucked the dye up their stems by capillary action.  After a few hours, the dye travelled right up into the petals which changed colour, depending on the dye used - we created yellow, pink, red, blue and green flowers out of the original white ones.

Who am I? challenge

Everyone wrote a description about themselves.  The descriptions were organised into three sentences or 'clues'.  At the end, we had to decide who we thought the person was.  Sometimes the clues were easy to follow and we guessed correctly, sometimes the clues were too vague (not clear enough for the reader to follow) and we guessed incorrectly.  Either way, everyone has enjoyed reading them at SSR time.

CBS Fun Run

On Tuesday, 12th April we had the CBS Fun Run.  We had to compete with ourselves and do as many laps of the field as we could in twelve minutes.  Everyone did their personal best, and enjoyed a cooling ice block afterwards.

Parent helpers marked our hands to record each lap.

We tried to keep up a steady, even pace for the entire twelve minutes.

Afterwards we counted the marks on our hands and recored our score as a a tally mark and a numeral. 

Lastly, we placed our whiteboards in order to show show many people completed the same number os laps . . . then, finally, it was time for a mouth watering ice block with our lunch. 

Zones of the Ocean

We have been learning about the zones in the ocean and the different sea creatures that are adapted to live there: the sunlight zone where seaweed was grow, the twilight zone which still gets some sunlight filtering down and the midnight zone where they is no light at all (the vast layers of seawater above blocks it out completely).

We watched videos, read library books and researched on the internet to investigate the different environments and sea life.  Then we made out own classroom display of the ocean.

We started with the midnight zone.  We shaded the blue paint with black to get a very deep shade of blue.

The twilight zone was next,.

We blended in plenty of white paint to make the correct shade of blue for the sunlight zone.

We added the continental shelf, seaweed and weeds, but most importantly, all the sea creatures we had researched and grouped by zone.