ASPIRE team

Science

Welcome to Science in 2019! We’ve had an action packed start to the year and have dived straight into our learning. We’ve had lots of hands on learning to underpin our scientific enquiries.

Foundation have been learning about the needs for different animals to stay alive. We’ve been exploring how our five senses can help to keep us safe. This week we used our senses to explore an apple and used some descriptive words to help us.

The Juniors are thinking about growing and changing. We are focused on small invertebrates and right now we are conducting a long term investigation to investigate how a meal worm grows and changes over its lifetime. Students are taking daily photos and we will keep a record of changes.

The Middle School students are taking a look at Eucalypts and doing some fantastic investigations into how to identify a gum tree. We now know to look for hanging leaves that have that distinctive eucalyptus smell. We can also identify a tree by the flower caps whose beautiful colours come from a lot of stamens! These flowers have no petals! We are beginning our major investigation which will be to see if we can successfully germinate some seeds. We will be undertaking a study to see if different conditions will make a difference to our success!

The Seniors are busily learning about micro-organisms. So far, we are concentrating on yeast. This week we investigated just exactly what it is that yeast needs to activate. We conducted a really fun experiment and concluded that yeast needs a warm liquid to activate and a sugar to feed on. This results in the yeast producing a gas. We could tell the gas was present when our balloons attached to our test bottles inflated. They popped right up!  

We are looking forward to continuing our investigations over the next few weeks. 

Art News

Our foundation students have been working on identity and drawing and making themselves out of many materials and resources.

Our Juniors are enjoying getting messy and creating a castle out of paper mache. They are enjoying working as part of a team.

Our middles are creating fish and using skills in drawing, painting, cutting and sewing.

Our seniors are working on perspective and are making their names 3D.

You will likely be hearing new Indonesian words for body parts. Please encourage your children to use these words so they can remain in their long term memory.

Thank you for your continued donations.

Kym Wallace