Inquiry

GREEN THUMBS INCORPORATED

The gardening inquiry group have been really busy this term taking charge of  "tsjuz-ing" up the gardens around our school. We started thinking about what everybody might like so we sent around an excel survey to get everybody's point of view.

We covered the garden area just outside the office with pea straw kindly donated by Gavin and Laura Lill. In here we planted flowers that keep blooming throughout the winter.



Here is our strawberry patch outside Double Hill. The kids thought it a good idea to reuse the tile mosaics made by themselves when they were in this room.




Here's our herb wheel outside Staveley. Clockwise from top we have  parsley, chives, oregano and thyme. Pizza anyone?




This is our plant nursey set up in the library because it is nice and warm. We scattered rockery mix seeds in peat pots, ready to plant out somewhere when the danger of frost has gone. We also have swan plants sprouting. Note our use of recycling with our home made watering bottles- they work a treat.



We went down to Methven Motors to get some tyres to make a vegetable garden. Thanks to Brent and the team at Methven Motors for allowing us to take these away. The deck at the Blue Pub was highly entertained by our group wheeling tyres along the street.



We then went to visit our friends at Hammer Hardware to get some compost to put into our vegetable tyre garden. Thanks to the team at Hammer who kindly gave us  a 10% discount on what we bought as well as some free seedlings.

Cabbage patch

The worm farms are bursting - think spaghetti!

Cauliflowers

We made a Borrowers garden for Rokeby and Mitcham. We hope they like it.

Fair testing in Science

One of the best parts about science is getting to do cool experiments. The kids are learning that there is a scientific method that pretty much used worldwide by e very scientist when doing cool science experiments. In reading the kids have learned about the scientific method and all the parts that are involved (links back to our concept of STRUCTURE) quite nicely.




We dived straight in and followed this process by making paper planes and fiddling with them to make them better (more power!)

First up we asked a big question:  How can we make a paper plane fly further?

We did some research (basically we made a whole heap of paper planes and chucked them about outside which was great fun) to find which type of paper plane was a good one.


Paige, Mikayla and Hannah contemplate a career with Boeing.


After some testing and general good fun of an afternoon we got back down to serious business of  hypothesising.  We wondered what we could change about our plane to make it fly further. Thinking caps were slapped on, turned up to the MAX and away we went. There was a flurry of paper clips to add weight, sellotape to hold parts together more, scissors to clip wings, much folding of plane noses and wings ensued until the engineers were satisfied that they could be onto something BIG!

In the interests of fair testing we made some decisions about how to launch the plane and how to measure the distance it flew.  Let the testing begin!


Recording how far the planes flew. Repeating the tests a number of times and taking the average.


Patrick measures just how far his plane flew.


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