Welcome

Welcome to a new year and a new Rua. Today marks our seventh day of school and we've been busy building relationships, learning new routines, exploring science, finding out about beach safety, writing, drawing, creating, and reading, reading, reading (more about that in the next post). Here's a sample of what we've been up to.

Our interests drive the learning: The boys were making a tower and wondered how tall they could get it. The next question was: Is it as tall as Mrs Arnold? (Yes) This spontaneous play activity is the perfect lead-in to our maths unit on measurement. For the next few weeks we will explore non standard measures like these as well as standard measures (centimetres, metres, litres, etc).

Team work: We've been challenging ourselves to work with different people and have reflected on how to be a good buddy when we are working together.

Exploring through science: This term we are looking at bubbling and fizzing. We discovered we can blow up a balloon by mixing vinegar and baking soda. Some of us thought the bottle would explode when we put the baking soda and vinegar in because we'd seen something similar on Youtube. We were surprised when the balloon blew up instead. This led to some great discussion on what we observed and why it might be different to the videos.

Reporting, Discussing and Wondering: After our first experiment we made plastic bag 'bombs' and bottle rockets that were also powered by baking soda and vinegar. Many of these experiments didn't 'work' the first time. Again we discussed what was happening and wondered what we could change. Out ideas led to changes that gave us more success the second time round. We reported our observations with drawings and writing.

Trying new things: Life guards in the making.