A pōwhiri, cross-country training, Netball, Rugby, two new students - welcome Alice and Brodie - and Where in the World is Kōkā Nolian? Oh, how this week has flown by!
In our Kiwi Reading workshops, we have had the pleasure of using Science Kits from The House of Science. This weeks topic was Climate Change. We took part in 3 different activities/experiments all related to understanding the changes that are occurring currently on our Earth.
Firstly, we discussed and debated different pictures and classified these into groups. Then we learned about the Atmosphere, Biosphere, Geosphere and the Hydrosphere and decided which pictures belonged where. We found out through a game of Jenga that our Earths Systems depend on each other.
Our next activity looked into how much water and how much land makes up our Earth. Most of us agreed that there is more water than land on Earth, but a couple of us disagreed so we did an experiment to find out. We had to catch a globe and write down if our thumbs landed on land or water. At the end of 20 go's we calculated the percentage and came to the conclusion that yes there is more water than land. In fact, the earth is made up of 70% of water.
Our last experiment required us to freeze a mixture of water, salt, and blue food coloring inside of a balloon overnight. We then had to add this to a container of saltwater to emulate sea ice and seawater. In this experiment, we learned that melting sea ice does not contribute to sea-level rise but land ice (icebergs, glaciers and ice shelves) does.
