Specialist News 

STEM NEWS

Hello, I’m Sophie Colesmith and I’m lucky enough to be the new STEM teacher at SMPPS. I’ve been teaching for 7 years. While I’ve been a classroom teacher for the last several years, I started my teaching career as a Science Specialist. I have a science background having worked as a biochemist before working as an Education Officer for the CSIRO. I used to take science experiments to schools all over Victoria, teaching everything from prep physics to year 12 Genetic Engineering. 

I love our school’s focus on curiosity and passion projects. Apart from science and teaching, my passions are acting and theatre. I’ve been acting, doing classes and watching as much theatre as I can for as long as I can remember. 

I’m an Albert Park local and enjoy taking my dog Monty and husband for walks by the beach. 

This term in STEM we are focusing on Chemical Science and developing our Science

 Inquiry Skills. In all year levels we have been doing experiments and focusing on our observational skills and learning to accurately collect data.

If you’d like to do some STEM at home, there are lots of great ideas and resources online. Recently I’ve discovered some terrific DYI STEM activities on www.kiwico.com/diy 

including an experiment we had coincidentally done with the prep to 2s, with milk, food dye and dishwashing liquid.

Or try some kitchen chemistry. This week a lot of our classes have loved using purple cabbage juice as a pH indicator and watching the purple colour change to red/pink or blue/green depending on whether we mixed it with an acid (lemonade, citric acid, cream of tartar, vinigar) or a base (bicarb soda, laundry detergent). You can test all sorts of pantry items by mixing them with water first. Egg whites are also acidic, so you can make green eggs by adding a few drops of purple cabbage juice to your egg whites.

You make the purple cabbage juice by cutting up red cabbage and soaking it in hot water, the purple colour comes out of the leaves and dyes the water purple. 

PHYSICAL EDUCATION NEWS