Thursday, June 21, 2012

Multiplication Challenge


We have been learning about multiplication.  Today we had a maths challenge.  Mrs Griffin put cards all around the room and we had to find them and work out the total on the cards.  We used skip counting and our knowledge of doubles to help us work out the answers.
Next time Mrs Griffin is going to get us to write an equation for each card....




Some of the cards in our maths challenge.....





Growing Crystals

We grew some crystals on a rainbow of pipe cleaners.  We used a borax and water solution. 

3 Experiments and Nursery Rhymes

What an awesome afternoon we had with Room 2.  We completed three different experiments and worked on ordering some nursery rhymes as well.  We were pretty busy, but we had a lot of fun.

Our experiments were looking at Changing States of Matter. 

Lemon Juice & Baking Soda
What happens when we mix lemon juice (an acid) with baking soda (an alkali)?  We worked together to find out.  First we squeezed lemon juice into test tubes.  Then we tipped some baking soda in and watched what happened.  It was pretty exciting....


Taking turns to hold the test tube......




Baking Soda & Vinegar

What happens when we mix vinegar (an acid) and food colouring with baking soda (an alkali)?  We used eye droppers to pick up a mixture of vinegar and food colouring.  Then we dropped it into a tray of baking soda to see what would happen.  We had some magnifying glasses so we could see the action up close.  We listened to the sound it made too.


Using a magnifying glass to see the reaction up close.




Tasting the vinegar.....


Working together


Oil & Water Art

If we mix oil, food colouring and water, does the oil dissolve in the water?  To find out what happens, we wrote our names in crayon on paper and then dipped our paper in a mixture of oil, water and food colouring.


Thursday, June 14, 2012

Fairy Tales, Characters and Adjectives

Sorry its been so long since you have heard from us.  We have been busy doing lots of things and Mrs Griffin has been in Australia for a week.  She has been on a special tour of Sydney schools that are using technology in innovative ways.  Mrs Griffin went to the Apple HQ and also saw schools using BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in classrooms.  She also got to see a classroom where every child had an iPad of their own to use.

But in the meantime, we have been learning about adjectives (describing words) and characters in fairy tales.  We have been looking at characters like bears in different stories and words that we use to describe them.  Because we are also looking at Changing States of Matter, we did some art that involves bears, adjectives and changing states of matter.  

We had a go at drawing a bear, which was pretty challenging for our spatial awareness.  Mrs Griffin modelled the steps to draw a bear and we followed each step.  Then we dyed the whole page and let it dry.  Then we mixed up Puff paint in lots of colours and painted our bears.  Mrs Griffin went around our outlines with gold or silver raised paint.  Then we cut out a nose from black paper and glued it on.

Take a look at our awesome bears - we made a Puff Paint using shaving foam mixed with PVA glue and paint.