Middle School News

Year 3

Literacy
Our Grade 3 students have been exploring poetry over the past two weeks, focusing on the literary techniques needed to create a great poem. They have studied two poems, the first being "The Ant Explorer," written by C.J. Dennis, an Australian poet. This poem tells the story of a small, adventurous ant that sets off on an exploration despite warnings from older ants. It follows an AABB rhyming structure and is light-hearted, engaging students while emphasising the ant's perseverance and enthusiasm.

The second poem the Grade 3s have been exploring is "Mulga Bill's Bicycle," by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson. This poem also follows the AABB rhyme scheme and is written in a comedic tone. It humorously explores themes of overconfidence and the consequences of underestimating challenges.

Maths
In maths, the Grade 3s have been learning about fractions, including what a fraction is, the parts of a fraction, such as the numerator and denominator, as well as equivalent fractions.

Butter Experiment
To conclude our 'States of Matter' unit, our Grade 3 students have been engaging in hands-on science experiments, exploring the different states of matter they've learned about this term. This week, they conducted a butter experiment to observe its changes in state. Butter demonstrates a transition between states when it melts and solidifies. The Year 3s hypothesised what would happen if they shook cream at a constant rate to see if they could change its state and make butter. They worked in groups, shaking the cream vigorously until they could shake no more, recording their observations throughout the process.

Grade 3's and 4's
Topic - We made OOBLEK!
The Grade 3 and 4 students have been exploring both Newtonian and non-Newtonian liquids. A Newtonian liquid is a type of fluid that follows Newton's law of viscosity, meaning its viscosity remains constant regardless of the amount of force applied to it. Common examples of Newtonian liquids include water, air, and most oils. Their flow characteristics are predictable and remain the same under different conditions of stress or strain.

In contrast, non-Newtonian fluids change their viscosity when subjected to stress for example tomato sauce or corn starch in water. Our Grade 3 and 4 students conducted an experiment on a non Newtonian liquid and made OOBLEK!

Oobleck is a mixture of corn starch and water that exhibits unique behaviour when pressure is applied, making it a non-Newtonian fluid. Specifically, it behaves as a shear-thickening fluid, meaning its viscosity changes depending on the force applied. For example, when you hold Oobleck without applying any force, it flows like a liquid. However, when you apply pressure, such as punching it, Oobleck behaves like a solid and becomes very firm.

This behaviour is what makes Oobleck a non-Newtonian liquid

Year 4
Literacy
The Year 4 students have been improving their sentence structure by writing complex sentences that follow the Independent, Dependent, and Dependent-Independent structure.

In the images below, you can see where students have underlined their independent clauses, circled their subordinate conjunctions, and dotted their dependent clauses.

Writing
The Grade 4 students have put all of their prior knowledge to the test and written a complex writing piece based on a picture prompt. It was fantastic to see all of the hard work that has paid off this term as our students have been writing more complex sentences, including descriptive adjectives and rich vocabulary.
Here are some examples of some students writing pieces.