Specialist News
Visual Arts - Physical Education - Music & Performing Arts & S.T.E.M.
Mrs Denise, Mr Rees, Mr Lytton and Mr Brokate
STEM: We need your donations please!
Hello. Before I get to the many wonderful things we have covered in STEM so far this term, I would love to speak to you about donations. When we start crafting and building we will go through an awful lot of materials - many of which can be recycled by donating to the school. I love to re-use items that would otherwise be thrown away.
Across the year the STEM program could easily use the following donations:-
- Cardboard boxes that can be cut by scissors (cereal boxes, muesli bars, shapes)
- Shoeboxes or boxes of a similar size (for dioramas)
- Paper Towel cardboard tubes (unfortunately not toilet roll tubes)
- Coloured paper or old wrapping paper
- Straws, pipe cleaners,pom poms or any crafting supplies that are spare/unwanted
- Bottle cap lids
- Old material
- Unused lego
- Or anything you think the imagination of a child could use.
These items can be dropped off outside the STEM room (portables 1+2), opposite the Theircare building or placed in the red tub just inside the doors to the school library or even sent to STEM with your child.
I am also collecting any old electronics that may contain a circuit board (such as old dvd players, modems etc) for the students in grade 5-6 to dismantle in Term 3.
Any donations big or small are always appreciated. If you don’t need it anymore and you think we can re-use and recycle it - please consider donating.
Thank you
STEM: Our Term so far
It has already been an eventful and busy Term and we are only 6 weeks into the school year. I have seen the improvement in the Grades 1-6 with them building on the prior knowledge of last year plus their own knowledge from home. This newsletter I have focussed on some photos of the P-2s and next STEM entry it will be grade 3-6 but I will confess it is hard to remember to take photos during that teaching moment!
In Prep, we have been regularly looking at the properties of materials (hard/soft, bendy, stretchy) and recent started talking about solids, liquids and gases. We have completed our investigation of the 3 little pigs where the prep students attempted to build houses out of straw/hay, sticks and then lego bricks and duplo. The big bad wolf (hairdryer) was unable to blow down any of the brick houses. The straw did make quite a mess outside!
In Grade 1-2 we started theTerm looking at properties of materials and why they are chosen. The grade 1-2s had a great time attempting to create spaghetti and marshmallow towers versus the students who were building houses out of chickpeas and toothpicks.
The last two weeks we have been doing a deep dive in the 'liquid' of the solid, liquid and gases by investigating the properties of water. We complete a walking water experiment (and created some wonderful rainbows) and this week we made out Sensory bottles for use at home.
In Grade 3-4, we completed some early experiments on heat transfer and then we continued our journey to program the sphero robots to move, spin, change colour, change picture and talk. The students have now started creating a diorama of the water cycle (and some students are challenging themselves to having moving sections or actually include water). At the moment we are 1 lesson into this 3 build cycle and any surviving builds will be sent home.
In Grade 5-6 we started by attempting to create a mini hot air balloon that would rise off the ground using heat/fire. There were only a couple of successes in each grade but many spectacular and exciting fails. The students started their new coding course on code.org - This website can be used at home as the students just needs to remember their section code and secret words (which I can provide for any families who would like them). The website is free to use and offers other challenges of creating games, dance videos or creating music in music lab. This week the grade 5-6s began to plan their own personal challenge project for the year that will be worked on one lesson each Term. There are a lot of students who plan to create online games (from the begin - not just a remix), or test 'elephant toothpaste', making the next consumer items or using circuits to create fans, cars or even a dinosaur.
Stephen Lytton, STEM Specialist.