STEAM News

Foundation students planted bean seeds this week. We have been talking about what plants need to grow and how to plant and look after our bean seeds. We will be checking on the growth of our seeds during STEAM sessions and looking forward to taking home bean plants at the end of term.

Year 1 students have been learning about dinosaurs, looking at their names and what they tell us about their behaviour. Some student explored the Archaeologist: Jurassic Games app where they got to dig for fossils and build skeletons of real dinosaurs. They were also introduced to AR-augmented reality and got to see dinosaurs moving in the STEAM room!

Year 2 students are learning all about life cycles and this week they were lucky enough to meet our mealworms! We discussed the various stages mealworms go through and then used magnifying classes to look at these creatures up close. We will be monitoring the growth of the mealworms over the term and wait to see if they turn into darkling beetles!

For the past two weeks, Year 3 students have been using the Lightbot app to guide a robot to light up blue tiles, by giving him a set of commands. Students have been programming Lightbot and debugging along the way, changing the program or commands, if he makes a mistake. It has been wonderful to see the students persist and not get discouraged when their program did not work the first time.

Year 6 students have been using Google maps to find places and various locations around the world by using coordinates for latitude and longitude. They have found out about prime meridian, and the three main lines of latitude-the Equator, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. We also had a lively discussion about which train station-McKinnon or Ormond is the closest to our school. (As the crow flies). Using the Google maps measuring distance tool, McKinnon train station is around 100m closer than Ormond train station.

Dorothy Markou

STEAM Teacher