STEAM News

STEAMing Ahead

National Science Week took place around Australia last week and the STEAM room was a buzz of activity with all things science! The STEAM room is always a hive of activity and below is a sample of what some year levels have been up to over the past two weeks.

Foundation

Foundation students continued to monitor the growth of their bean plants and recorded their observations in their STEAM books. Most bean seeds have sprouted and developed into seedlings with roots. Students enjoyed looking at how long some of the root systems were in several bean plants. We also looked at the different leaves around our school grounds and recognised that we can group them by colour, size, shape, patterns and texture. Foundation students then created 'leaf people or animals' from the leaves we collected.

Year 1/2

Year 1/2, learnt all about static electricity. They had a fun time making butterfly wings flap with the help of a balloon! Rubbing the balloon on their hair or clothing created static electricity, causing the balloon to attract the paper wings and as such make them flap. They learnt all about positive and negative particles and were keen to try this experiment at home!

Year 3

Year 3 students were surprised to see how much their mushrooms had grown since last week. The favourable living conditions in the STEAM storeroom and regular watering has seen them pop up out of the nutrient rich soil they arrived in only a few weeks ago. 

Year 4

Year 4 students have been looking at the Fibonnaci sequence. The sequence is a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceeding numbers, starting with 0 and 1. The sequence is found in nature, like in the spiral arrangement of seeds in a sunflower or the number of petals on some plants. Students then coded flowers using the Scratch coding platform. 

Year 4s also completed their hand pollinators. Students have been learning about how bees pollinate flowers and they were challenged to build a hand held bee pollinator which could transport pollen (orange jelly crystals) from one flower to another. They had lots of fun making bee pollinators using only two pom poms, 1 icy pole stick, 1 clothes peg and up to 3 pipe cleaners.

Year 5

Year 5  Students have been learning about animal adaptations. They have been researching an animal and collecting information on how it has adapted to its environment by taking notes on structural, physical and behavioural adaptations. Year 5s will be presenting their findings as an interactive poster by connecting it to a Makey Makey circuit and coding the facts in Scratch. 

Year 6 

Year 6  Year 6 students have been learning all about symmetry and identifying examples of symmetry in the world around us. They then selected a picture of an animal or object and carefully drew the matching half on grid paper. The attention to detail and accuracy was outstanding.

Regards,

Mrs Markou & Mrs Hadi

STEAM Specialists