News from Three/Four 

Opening the Doors Foundation Walk-a-thon

Last week the year 3/4 students thoroughly enjoyed the Walkaton.  Many students raised money for the foundation and were excited to see how many points they collected each day.  Thankyou to the families for supporting this.

Maths

Over the last few weeks, we have been learning about collecting data, posing questions and creating graphical representations of data.  This has been a great learning experience. Each day we have added to our Olympics Medal Tally, working out which country has added more medals to their tally overnight.  Some students have collected their own data about countries they are interested in and have tracked their medal tally wins.  We have even created a class Medal tally to track the countries of Australia, USA, France, South Korea and Japan.

Inquiry

We have been learning about forces in Inquiry. Last week students conducted a friction experiment. They worked in small groups to identify the effects of surface friction by measuring the height a ramp of different surfaces needed to be before a car would roll down it. The students recorded the heights and made conclusions from their results.

 Another highlight of Inquiry last week was our Friction-man race. Students were shown a model of a 'friction-man' - a cardboard man with two small straws taped on his arms, with a piece of wool looped through them. 

Students were asked to use what they knew about friction to design and make their own Friction Climber. Key questions were

 ● Are we trying to increase or decrease friction between the straws and wool? 

● Does the size of your climber affect his speed?

● Does the positioning of the straw pieces affect your climber? 

● What changes can you make to improve your climber?

There was an exceptional amount of critical and creative thinking, investigating, trial and error, questioning and discussions as students designed, made and refined their friction men - "I'm going to make mine smaller", "I think his head needs to be heavier", "he keeps tipping forward so I'm going to tape something heavy to his legs",  "his feet need to be smaller as they keep getting caught on the string" were some of the comments heard. Although some were completely unsuccessful, despite the students' perseverance and patience, the successful friction men designers/builders had the opportunity to participate in races. The final results were Gold - Oliver; Silver - Bennett; Bronze - Cooper

Lisa Bourke and Katie Vranken