Boat building challenge - Part 1

Hello everyone and welcome back to school!  Here in Room 2, we have kick-started our final term with a boat building S.T.E.M challenge.

Throughout the year, our school has been focusing on "Awa (River)" - in term one we looked at the water cycle, in term two we looked at water conservation and what makes a healthy awa, in term three we learnt about the history of our own awa 'Taumarere', and for this term we are going to look at creating something that can float on our awa.

The challenge: To build a boat that will allow our "explorers" to sail across the ocean without sinking.

First we had to do a lot of brainstorming together in small groups.  We were only given certain materials to use for the challenge.  Furthermore, we had to buy the material using our class dojo points that we have been collecting throughout the year. 




Our groups have successfully built a boat each, and some of us have been able to test our boats on water.  Our next step is to test our boat with our explorer as well.

Watch this space...

Cleaning up our Community

On Thursday the whole school gathered together with a mission to clean up our Awa and the surrounding town.  The Junior syndicate cleaned the school and the streets that go from our school to town, the middle syndicate cleaned the parks around town and the senior syndicate jumped in the water and cleaned out our river.

This event ties into our topic for the term "water conservation" and we could not believe all the rubbish we had found.  Check out our slide with some pictures of the day.

The Water Cycle

This term our topic is Water conservation and we thought the best place to start with water conservation is to find out where water comes from.  Did you know that majority of Earth's water is salt water?  Room 2 has been learning about the water cycle and the three phases which are: evaporation, condensation and precipitation.  We made our very own water cycle in a bag and we have been watching the water cycle in action.

The night before Christmas animation

Our class read the famous poem "Twas the night before Christmas" (Otherwise known as A visit from St. Nicholas)   Written by Clement Clarke Moore.  Here is Miria, Payton and Tahlya's animation based on this poem.  Enjoy!