Soccer Taster

We were lucky enough to have a soccer taster today with Brandon.

We started off playing soccer stuck in the mud.

We then got split into four groups and one person from each group got to practice being a goalkeeper as the rest of the group tried to score a goal.

We then played a game of bull rush, but with soccer balls. 

Thanks Brandon we had heaps of fun! 

Energetic Bounce

We have begun exploring our science topic for this term...energy. We plan to learn about the different types of energy and how energy can be transferred.

Today we looked at gravitational energy. Using tennis balls and larger balls we explored the energy of their fall by counting the number of bounces that happened when the ball hit the ground and by observing the height of the first bounce. 

We discovered that the balls had a larger first bounce and a greater number of  bounces when the ball was dropped by a taller person or when we were standing on something. Alex suggested that this was because the balls had a longer distance to fall, and she suggested that this means that the balls get more energy. Xavier suggested that the energy came from gravity. 

We compared the energy from a tennis ball with the energy from a basketball. We found that the basketball had a larger bounce and had more bounces when it hit the ground than a tennis ball. We thought it was because it got more energy from gravity as it dropped. Miss Hall wondered why and asked us what we noticed about the tennis ball and the basketball when we compared them. Mahek said that the basketball was heavier. We all decided that heavier things fall faster than lighter things and more energy is transferred to the heavier things by gravity...this is why we think the basketball bounces higher and has a greater number if bounces than the tennis ball. 

We then did something really exciting...we placed the tennis ball on top of the basketball and dropped them both at the same time. What do you think happened? Watch this video to find out what we discovered.

Heine wanted to know what would happen if we reversed the balls and had the basketball on top of the tennis ball. We predicted that the basketball wouldn't bounce really high or really fast like we had observed with the tennis ball. We thought this because the basketball is heavy and the tennis ball doesn't get much energy from gravity as it falls, so therefore there wouldn't be much energy to transfer to the basketball. We tested our hypothesis...we discovered that our hypothesis was correct! The basketball didn't bounce as high or as fast as the tennis ball. We noticed that it bounced much less than it did when it was dropped on it's own. 

Could you repeat our experiment? Did you get the same results that we got? We would love to hear what you discovered!

Splish, Splash...it's Swimming time

This week we have been splishing and splashing up a storm with the Dean Greenwood swim school.

We've been growing our confidence duck diving into the water and swimming with kick boards.

We have been practicing our freestyle and backstroke swimming.

We have been learning how to turn when we get to the end of the pool.

We are all excited to learn something new next week!

Upcycled Rabbit Food Farm

This term we were given a big problem to solve...our school rabbits needed to have a constant supply of food. Unfortunately a few weeks into this term one of our school rabbits died...but this hasn't stopped us from farming food for Rumble.

Like any good farmer we needed to understand our customer (Rumble)...What can he eat? How much does he eat? and so on. This meant we needed to do a little research and ask some experts questions about rabbits - our school rabbit keepers and Mrs Rogers.

After gaining some knowledge about our customer, what his needs and wants are we set about planning our rabbit food farm. After walking around our school we quickly discovered some problems...we needed space for our farm, and space at our school is hard to come by! We needed to freely get to our farm to check that our plants were growing well, but it's winter! Lot's of rain and very cold! Balls go flying all over the place at our school, so we needed a space where they would be protected from balls. We worked together to come up with possible solutions using what we knew about the needs of plants. We decided to create a garden inside our classroom!

We wondered if we needed to ask someone if we could do this. We began writing a letter to Mr Bermingham to ask for permission to turn our classroom into a farm. Out letter was very persuasive!

While waiting for Mr Bermingham's reply we began to design our gardens. When shared our ideas with the students from Room 20. When we received the yes from Mr Bermingham, we began collecting materials to construct our garden.

Today we planted some of our gardens, and will hopefully have them all planted by the end of tomorrow. Rumble is going to be very well fed!

We Made a Garden!

Room 25 are making gardens at New Windsor School, because we have a rabbit at our school. We have been making our rabbit food gardens for a long time. We have been making our gardens with recycled bottles.

By Noah

Room 25 Made a Garden!

Room 25 has made a garden out of plastic bottles, that have been recycled. New Windsor School has one rabbit now. Rumble, our rabbit can now have fresh food and we dont have to buy it anymore. We have been making the garden for at least one week. We used ductape, scissors, dirt, plants, hole punchers, water and sharpies. Hope you want to do it too!

By Alex

Farm Garden

Today we started to make our farm garden. We planted the garden in our classroom. We are planting the garden for the school rabbit. We used recycled bottles to make the garden. I was kind of hard putting the rope in the holes. It was fun making the garden!

By Muket

Making Music

This term we have been learning how to create a soundscape. We began by exploring the sounds that we can make using our body (body percussion). We then moved on to creating a soundscape using untuned percussion instruments.

We used the wild winter storms we have been experiencing as inspiration to create a rainstorm soundscape. In grounds we explored the sounds our percussion instruments made. We decided on the symbols we would use to present the instruments that would be used to create the sound.

Here are some of our creations...

Our Special Guests...

We heard a "knock, knock" on our door. We all turned to look to see who was knocking on our classroom door. We saw three extremely tall rugby players delivering our milk.

We thanked them for our milk and asked for a photo.

The rugby players are at our school today as part of the launch of the ITM cup. 

Pentomino Detectives

We have been investigating pentominoes. With a buddy, we tried to make as many different 5 square unit shapes as possible. There were rules...we had to make sure at least one face of the square was touching another. 

How many different shapes could we make?

We discovered...

Which of the 12 pentominoes can be folded into an open box? We investigated some more!

A Foggy Frosty Morning

This morning when we arrived at school we found the surrounding New Windsor area blanketed in fog. 

What an awesome opportunity to write some poems! Here is what we wrote...

Mini Measurement Olympics

Today we put our estimating and measuring skills to the test as we competed in the cotton ball shot put, straw javelin and cardboard discus.

We first estimated the distance we thought we had thrown and then we worked together to measure the distance.

We had to work out the difference between our estimate and our actual measurement.

We won medals if our estimate were close to our actual measurement.

Cinquian Poems

We have been learning about nouns, verbs and adjectives through poetry. This term we have written cinquian poems on a number of different topics.

Last week we used our recently bad weather as inspiration for our poem.

Is all sand the same?

We've been looking at sand! We wanted to know if all sand was the same. We looked at sand samples from Piha, Blockhouse Bay, Big Bay and Port Waikato.

We discovered a few things! 

- sand can be different colours.

- some sand has little shells in it, like sand from Blockhouse Bay.

- some sand is rough to touch, like the sand from Blockhouse Bay and Piha.

- some sand feels soft, like the sand from Port Waikato.

- some sand is magnetic, like the sand from Port Waikato. We know that magnets stick to metal, so we think there must be metal in the sand from Port Waikato. 

We have layered all the sand samples in a jar...we wonder if we can separate the Port Waikato sample from the other sand using a magnet?