Science, Technology, and Engineering

Communicating with the Specialist Team

We look forward to partnering with you in 2023, and welcome your input:

Hayley Oliver (Science, Technology, and Engineering)  Hayley.Oliver@education.vic.gov.au

It’s always a busy, hands-on time in the Science room. 

Level 3/4 learning:

The Year 3/4 students have continued to learn about Force. We had a lesson focussing on gravity and no matter how hard we tried, how high we jumped or how much force we put into our balloon hits, everything always came back down. Some students were surprised to learn that gravity is a force that pulls object and everything down, rather than the weight of the object falling. We then looked at gravity around the world and had a go at drawing a diagram of someone dropping a balloon around the world. The students had to draw an arrow pointing to the direction that they thought the balloon would fall. 

Over last couple of weeks the 3/4s have had the task of creating, designing and making a board game. It can be any sort of game, based on one they already know, or something they have made up completely, the only catch is that within the game there must be some kind of element of force. The students have been really excited about these and I can’t wait to see and hopefully play, their finished products. 

Level 5/6 learning:

In Year 5/6 we are continuing to study light. We have looked at how shadows are made, and discussed the terms, opaque, translucent and transparent and what each of these mean for light and shadows. The students had fun creating shadow puppets, either on a stick or using a cup and stencil. Some groups even turned their shadows into a fun play and demonstrated their knowledge of light and shadow by making some puppets of the same size appear larger or smaller than each other. 

Last week students were given a challenge, how can they make a cup form a shadow if an object was in the way of the light. They weren’t allowed to lift the torch, move the object or the cup. After some time, many of them said it was impossible. After a brief discussion, some students said they would be able to do it, if they had a mirror! Mirrors (CDs) were then provided to each group and through using reflection, they were able to make a shadow. Not impossible afterall! 

We have discussed how light moves in straight lines and have drawn many diagrams to demonstrate this. This week the students were introduced to the term, refraction – the bending of light. In this lesson we used a transparent object (a glass jar) to put water in and watched how objects changed, some grew larger, some looked like they had moved away from the rest of their body and some objects disappeared altogether! We then started to draw some line patterns to see what would happen when we passed a jar of water in front of our patterns. These will be on display in the coming weeks.