Egg-cellent Experiments!

The Pukeko reading group have been having lots of fun learning to make inferences and identify key information from texts.  We have also been tying our reading learning into our Science Fair term topic.

This week we are looking at 'The Acid Effect'!  Natalie bought some eggs from her chickens and Koka Ngaire bought the vinegar... we have put the egg into the jar with the vinegar and we are now leaving it for a week.

What can you see already happening?

We discovered that this is the calcium of the egg reacting with the vinegar (the acid) - the bubbles are the shell being dissolved by the acid (vinegar).

We can't wait to see what happens... our hypothesis is that we think the egg is going to lose its shell completely and be 'bendy'.

Our modifications - what acid did we use?

We thought about our previous experiment with acid's and came up with a modification to this experiment.  Looking at our earlier blogs - what acid do you think we have added to water to see if we can make the same reaction with the egg?











UPDATE: The egg has been in the vinegar for one week... today we took it out and had a feel and a look at what was left.  Ewwww... but exciting!  Listen to Izzy, Poppy and Santino explain the experiment and the results.
And for the big finale - WHAT WAS INSIDE THE EGG?
*We thought the egg may have 'cooked' from the vinegar
*We thought the white and yolk may be solid like a hard boiled egg

The results surprised us!!  And we were pretty impressed that the egg bounced!

Storybird QuickWrites

By Edith

 Today we learnt about a great website called 'Storybird.com'.

We are going to use this once a week for digital quickwrites, as not everyone in our class has success with writing with a pencil or pen... we find it easier on a device.

By Stevii

The topic for this week was: "There's a monster in my...".  Everyone in class had the same 100 words to use.  Some of us struggle to find the words to use when we have to write - this was great because the words were already there for us... we just had to create our own response.

By Lani

Those of us who love to write found it exciting and a challenge - because some words that we wanted to use weren't there.  We had to think really hard about how we put the words together.

A tip we learnt was that each line should make sense on it's own.
We found out that reading our work out aloud to ourselves helped us hear when we should use a new line.
We also realised that we can create impact by having short lines and long lines!

By Stevii

We had some fantastic output - that really painted a picture for our audience.
What do YOU think about some of these examples?  Check out our blogs for our own poems...

Science Experiments in Reading...

We have a science focus this term to get ready for our Science Fair.  During reading workshop time, the Fantail & Pukeko groups have been reading about and completing some simple science experiments.

We discuss our hypothesis, method, results and make conclusions.  We also have been thinking about modifications that we could make if we complete the investigation again. 

Making crystals with Epsom Salts

We have looked at how puddles evaporate, what happens (reaction) when an acid is put with a non-acid and how crystals grow.





The crystals were great to watch because the Epsom Salt crystals starting growing almost straight away.  We learned that every type of chemical that makes a crystal grows a different way.  The epsom salt crystals are long.

What happens with baking powder,
baking soda, water
and vinegar

We were pretty excited about putting an acid (baking powder) with an acid (vinegar) and seeing the reaction - our hypothesis was that it would make a BIG FIZZ... and we were right!

Thinking about puddles & evaporation

When we read about evaporation, we learned that the sun plays a big part on how fast the puddles evaporate.  However, we also found that we did not complete a FAIR TEST.  We had a big discussion about what we could do better next time to make it a fair test.  Now we just have to wait for the sun to shine again!

Survival of the Fittest

Last term Moana 3 was lucky to have a student teacher working with us for 5 weeks.  Matua Stephen loved science and he shared this passion with us.

We are very proud of our animals that we created after learning about 'SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST' and what features predators & prey have..   How were these features decided?  By roll of the dice!!

From here we had to research and find out what features were best fit for our animal's environment. 

Our learning:

 if animals hunt - their eyes are at the front.

If animals hide - their eyes are at the side.

Sharp teeth (front & molars) for carnivores

Flat, square teeth for herbivores

A mix of both (like us) for omnivores.

Thanks Matua Stephen for sharing your knowledge with us - we are all so proud of our creatures!

Celebrating our Mum's

Just before Mother's Day, those of us in Moana3 created some wonderful Mother's Day cards for all of our wonderful mums!

We wrote a poem for our mums using the following guidelines:

Line 1: Alliteration

Line 2: 3 adjectives to describe our mums

Line 3: a nickname

Line 4: a simile or metaphor about our mum

Line 5: a 3 word statement about our mum

We chose whether we wanted to create the inside digitally or by hand.

For the outside of the card, we used tissue and dye to create a blended pattern.  Koka Ngaire took our photo and we cut out fabulous hearts from a big pad of patterned paper.

We were all really proud of our efforts and our mum's appreciated and loved our efforts too!

TinkerLab - Balloon Powered Vehicles!

In Moana 3, every Friday we have our TinkerLab challenge... last week we started our challenge with CREATE.  

Creating, Thinking, Problem Solving, Collaborating!

We have our big junk box and our challenge this week was to create a vehicle that was powered by air out of a balloon.  

Most of us worked in buddies and created many different vehicles.  

We soon realised that we had to have free moving wheels and we had to think hard about how the propulsion from the air coming out of the balloon was going to move our vehicles and where we needed to attach the balloons - did we blow them up first or did we have to attach them and then blow them up?  Lots of critical thinking!

There was lots of practicing, taping and re-taping, modifications, changes and discussion!

At the end of our 30 minutes we had a SHARING session with each other where we looked at each other's creations and discussed what modifications we could make for next time.  

We then did some LEARNING where we researched balloon powered cars and found out how to make the most of the propulsion coming from the balloon.

We are going to TRY AGAIN this week, using what we learned from our own creations and what we researched.  Watch this space to see how we got on...

UPDATE:  Some of our cars were slightly more successful than others!  We learned that it was all about the wheels and axle.  Those cars with good round wheels went the best.  We also learned that to make an axle, we needed a skewer to go through a straw.  We were really happy with the results!!!
Our next challenge - using what we have learned here, we are going to create powered boats: propellors, balloon or jet.

Celebrating our Diversity!

For Term 2 we are going to have TinkerLab time where each week we are going to work with 'junk' to create around a theme.

In Moana we have 16 different nationalities!!  We think that is pretty impressive - don't you?

Koka Ngaire set us a challenge to Celebrate our Diversity through creating...



 This week:

We had to get in groups of 4 and Koka Ngaire gave us 20 sheets of newspaper, 1 metre of sellotape and 40 mins - that was it!!
We had to choose one nationality from our group and create a national costume using the newspaper... we had to make it really obvious which country our costume was from - Koka Ngaire and Koka Rachel (our DP) were judges (Koka Nolian our Principal came to see what all the excitment was about too!)

We had to communicate effectively with each other, we had to problem solve, we definitely had to think and we made connections with each other and to our cultures.

It was really fun and we definitely celebrated our diversity within our class!

Who do you think achieved our goal?

Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu

We have enjoyed using this first week back having a look at our buddy classes' blogs in our Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu group.  It is nice to have a genuine audience and one that has classes from different areas of New Zealand.  We are really just new to blogging last term - but we have picked it up quick and really enjoying sharing our learning with others and reading what other learners have been doing.

We have been impressed with the DLO's we have seen and also what some learners have given up for Lent.  We also enjoyed reading Anzac Day poem's  - they reminded us of our own  Anzac assembly we had today.

We are very keen to have a go at some super DLO's with animations and hope to be able to post them soon.  We are going to learn how to do this and our DP Koka Rachel has set us a challenge... keep watching for the results!!!