STEM News

So many exciting things have been happening in STEM (Science Technology Engineering & Math) this term! 

Foundation

We have welcomed the new Foundation students who are learning about weather and how we use our senses to observe and learn things. We have learned about night and day, clouds, temperature, and wind. Some classes had good weather and made kites to fly, others tried to make their own wind to move things around the classroom and then build a house that the Big Bad Wolf couldn't blow down.

Grade 1 & 2

This term in STEM Grade 1 and 2 have been excited to investigate mixtures, both liquid and dry, as well as how they can be separated. We have been learning to record our observations by drawing what we see or writing what happened in words. 

We have mixed dry substances together like cocoa powder, sugar, coconut, and rice puffs. Then we learnt how to separate them by size by sifting. We have mixed wet and dry substances together to see if the dry substances such as sugar and pepper dissolved in water. We have explored what happens when you mix oil and water, water and detergent, oil and detergent and then all three together. We have also learnt that we can separate liquid substances by their weight by practicing with chromatography using coloured marker pens. 

Grade 3 & 4

Watch out! Grade 3 & 4 have been passing secret messages using codes from the past and exploring how data can be shared by digital systems. You may have heard the beep beeeeeep beep of Morse code, seen them waving Semaphore flags, writing notes in scrambled letters that you can't make sense of (Caesar Cipher), or a strange alien language appearing...

Now we are working on making modern data for digital systems, looking at spreadsheets for sorting data, and being able to create and embed multimedia such as sound, photographs, video, and drawn images to our documents.

Grade 5 & 6

Are learning how computers communicate in binary notation and exploring wired and wireless connections of digital systems. They have encoded individual pixels for black white and a variety of colours, explored binary numbers and how data gets from things like a mouse or a key press get to and through the computer and back out to you. 

Understanding how computer systems operate allow us to build on the knowledge no matter how the programs we use change preparing students to be creators rather than passive users of technology in the future.

Next Term...

Foundation - learning about sequences and directional language to be able to instruct a robotic device where to move to. 

Grade 1 & 2 - exploring digital systems and their safe use, as well as being introduced to coding. 

Grade 3 & 4 - learning about forces and magnetism.

Grade 5 & 6  - will be doing a Science unit exploring states of matter and learning how to conduct a fair experiment.