STEM

Welcome to Term 2!

Foundation

At the end of term 1, we used our knowledge of the five senses to design our own 'Five Senses Robots' - robots that could see, touch, hear, smell and taste. Students loved creating their own robots, some of which had super-powers!

That's My Hat! (Observable properties of materials)

In term 2 we are exploring the observable properties of materials and the different way some materials are used in everyday situations. We began by exploring a range of hats, exploring the materials they are made from, how they feel and the purpose they are designed for. We discovered some hats will shade your face in the sun, some might keep you dry in the rain, some hats feel soft, furry, hard or rough, and some hats look really cool!

As we work towards designing our own party hats, we are investigating materials that are suitable for rainy days by testing what happens to objects when they get wet.

Year 1 and Year 2

To conclude term 1, students created short animations using ScratchJr to demonstrate what plants need to survive and thrive. Students were required to use the ScratchJr coding blocks to make a plant grow bigger while also including sunlight, water and soil in the animation.

Push-Pull (Investigating Forces)

In this unit of work, students will participate in a range of hands-on activities to explore pushes and pulls on a range of objects. We began term 2 exploring the forces of push and pull and identifying and sorting how and when we use these forces in everyday situations, such as 'pushing' in our chair, 'pulling' ourselves up on the monkey bars and 'pushing and pulling' a door to open or close it.

We have explored how forces affect different objects in water, learning about the 'pull' of gravity, that water can 'push' and some objects float, while others sink. To investigate these concepts, we first made predictions about what we thought would happen, tested our ideas and recorded our results.

Year 3 and Year 4

At the end of term 1, students applied their knowledge of animal life-cycles to create short stop-motion animations. Here is an example of a stop-motion animation of the frog life-cycle.

Distant Forces

This term, students are extending their knowledge of forces and exploring gravitational, magnetic and electrostatic forces. We have begun by learning about contact and non-contact forces, investigating gravitational force and magnetic force as examples of non-contact forces. To explore these concepts we are learning about conducting 'fair tests' where only one thing is changed and everything else is kept the same. 

Year 5 and Year 6

Last term we learnt about animal survival and important adaptations that enable animals to survive in specific environments. To put our learning into practice, we designed and created beetles that used different camouflage techniques to hide in a range of habitats.

Natural Disasters

This term, year 5 and year 6 students are learning about some of the different ways sudden geological changes can occur to Earth's surface and atmosphere. To begin, we have learnt about the structure of the Earth and atmosphere, learning that there are 4 layers of the Earth and 5 layers of the atmosphere. To demonstrate our learning about the structure of the Earth, students created labelled diagrams identifying each layer. They then used these diagrams to create 3D models of the Earth using play-dough. We carefully cut our models in half to show a cross-section model of the Earth. There were lots of 'oohs and aahs' as students cut through their models!