Singing at the Sound Shell, Wellington Botanic Gardens

Friends of Wellington Botanic Gardens are designing a garden with a special focus. It is a Children's Teaching Garden that is unique to Wellington. Such a wonderful idea! More information (and a YouTube clip) found here.

A group of us formed a small choir and have been practising hard for a special performance today at the Botanic Gardens as a fund raiser for the Children's Garden.

Ma ti Mahi Kaora from Mrs B on Vimeo.

Disco girls!

A fun night at our school disco!

Solar Ovens

We have been trying our hand at harnessing the sun's mighty solar power! We had to come up with a solar oven design, and then assemble it. When we finally got a hot, sunny day we tried cooking marshmallows - yum!

Leak-Proof Plastic Bag

Here's a fun experiment we tried in class today - it went so well that we are going to show it in assembly on Friday What you need: Plastic Zip Lock Bags Sharp Pencils Water What to do: Fill plastic bag with water and make sure to seal it tight. Gently 'stab' a pencil through the palstic bag until it pierces through the other side.

Surprise, surprise, NO water leaks out!

The Science behind it:

Despite what it looks like, the zipper-lock bag isn't covered in a magical sealant that blocks leaks. Well… not exactly. Plastic bags like these are made out of our favourite kind of materials, polymers! Polymers are long chains of individual molecules, called monomers. (See that? Mono = one. Poly = many. Mers = molecules.) When you puncture these bags with a sharpened pencil, you're essentially separating polymer chains without breaking them. The long chains of molecules than squeeze in tight around the surface of the pencil preventing any sort of leak. Polymers continue to prove an indispensable part of life. - See more at: http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/leak-proof-bag#sthash.jBCRn21H.dpuf

Pathway to Sporting Success with Valerie Adams

= Today we had a fantastic time over in Wainuiomata! We had an opportunity to attend a very exciting Athletics NZ event, playing all sorts of fundamental movement skills games. We also got to meet Valerie Adams and look at her latest gold medal. A special thanks to Athletics NZ for putting on such a fabulous day- and for the t-shirts and posters :)

Sports this season

Cooperative Games

We have been having loads of hilarious fun cooperating with others in PE this week!

As with any 'Photo Peach' show, please add comments here instead of on the Photo peach site - thanks! Cooperative Games :)

Market Day Term 3 2014

We had a great time at Market Day today - raising$1080 that goes towards our Year 6 Camp

Sound of the Week "V"

Loads of inVestigating happened in DiscoVery today!. The sound of the week was "V" so we put our Scientists hats on and obserVed what happened when we made laVa lamps. (Click on the link to make this at home)

 We also made lava for volcanoes - one to also be tried at home using vinegar and baking soda. Red food colouring made this look even more impressive!

Argo Floats and the Argonaut Club!

Argo Floats are instruments that float around in the ocean, measuring temperature and salinity (how salty the water is). They float at a parking depth of 1000m and move with the ocean current for 9 days. On the 10th day they sink to 2000m and for the next 10 hours , take measurements all the way back to the surface. Once on top of the water, they send this info off to a satellite and sink back down to 1000m for another 9 days. Argo Floats do this for over 5 years and there are more than 3600 floats all over the world.
(More info here - Way Down South)

Google Earth has a cool application that allows you to see where all these floats are. Click here to get this.  Google Earth Argo Application 
You'll find that your Google Earth will be covered in little green dots!

We are now able to adopt Argo Floats  - hence the Argonaut Club.
We made some Cartesian divers to see how Argo Floats 'sink' and we also adopted an Argo Float. Float 5903324 is in the Southern Ocean and has travelled 292 km so far.

Te Papa Scientists visit us!

We were really fortunate to have Scott, Laura, and Sarah visit our school today. All three work at Te Papa as educators and scientists.

Scott told us how all Scientists do 3 things - they observe, they hypothesise, and the report back on their findings. He showed us how we can do this with bubbles. Although we know and love bubbles, today we learnt a lot more about them!
 

(Our own Bubble writing will feature later next week)

Laura showed us some different penguins and told us about what sort of things she does as a scientist at Te Papa.

We really enjoyed having them visit.

The NED Show

Today “The NED Show” performed at school today. Matt showed us some cool yoyo tricks and told us a really whacky story about NED’s adventure on the way to visit us.

 There was the circus, roller coasters, round-the-world travel and those crazy aliens… what a funny story with a great message behind it!

NED stands for Never give up, Encourage others and Do your best.

Yoyos are available for sale from our school office.

Water Tension and other Water Experiments

We were investigating water in Discovery Time today as this week's sound of the week was "W".

 Water tension - how many drops can a cup really hold?



Water and air
">We tried to see if molecules of air could stop paper from getting wet.

What we needed:

Small Glass

A screwed up ball of paper

Glass bowl filled with water

What we did: Put the paper in the bottom of the glass then turned the glass upside down over the bowl and lowered it in to the water. We then lifted the cup straight up out of the bowl and took the paper out.

Water going up hill! (Absorption)

It was interesting to observe that clear water travelled up to paper towel first

ASB Sports Centre

The whole school had a trip to the ASB Sports Centre today. What a wonderful time we had! We tried our hand at netball skills, athletics and floorball (a little like unihoc) I'm sure we'll all sleep well tonight! Many thanks to Luke's mum and Nikora's dad for coming with us :)

100 Days of School!

We have been at school for 100 days this year so we had to celebrate! Joining in with Rooms 1,2 and 3 we had fun making 100 styled glasses, creating pictures of what we might look like when we are old, exploring patterns, the 100s chart, and finding 100 things in nature.