The Editing Glasses

Richie is peer conferencing with Finn, on his "Why I Can't Sleep" narrative. Nice look with the "editing glasses' boys.

Room 2 - Physicists - Electric Car Convention

Today we built and experimented with cardboard electric cars.  We turned into scientists and shared our claims and findings with our scientific community (our classmates).   Our big question was How might we make our car go as fast as possible for as long as possible.  We briefly talked about the safety rules we needed to follow and then we set off making our own cardboard electric cars.  Here are a few photos taken while we were creating...

After we'd had a bit of time to create we tested our creations to see how far they were able to move.  We discovered that some of our designs needed a bit of extra help and that some needed to be modified in order for them to work.    Here are a few photos of our final creations... 

We talked and shared as a scientific community about what we had discovered and thought carefully about what we might test again if we had time.  Here are a few of the notes about what we discussed...

Science Week Coke and Mentos

Check out the Science behind why this happens, it is surprising!!

Making Lots of Bubbles
After a lot of debate, scientists are now saying that the primary cause of Coke & Mentos geysers is a physical reaction, not a chemical reaction. Their explanation is this process called nucleation.

All the carbon dioxide in the soda – all that fizz – is squeezed into the liquid and looking for a way out. It’s drawn to any tiny bumps that it can grab onto. Those tiny bumps are called nucleation sites: places the gas can grab onto and start forming bubbles.

Nucleation sites can be scratches on a glass, the ridges of your finger, or even specks of dust – anywhere that there is a high surface area in a very small volume.

The surface of a Mentos is sprayed with over 40 microscopic layers of liquid sugar. That makes it not only sweet but also covered with lots and lots of nucleation sites.

In other words, there are so many microscopic nooks and crannies on the surface of a Mentos that an incredible number of bubbles will form around the Mentos when you drop it into a bottle of soda.

Since the Mentos are also heavy enough to sink, they react with the soda all the way to the bottom. The escaping bubbles quickly turn into a raging foam, and the pressure builds dramatically.

All that pressure has got to go somewhere, and before you know it, you've got a big geyser happening!

Learning with Science in a Van

The wonderful people of Science in a van, sharing their knowledge of forces with us.

Kauri Whanau Dance from Assembly

ASB Financial Literacy

A snap shot of our learning with Merlon from ASB.

Dance Time In Room 2

Today we heard some fantastic speeches in Room 2. I am so proud of all the hard work that the students have done towards their speeches. We needed a break today in between speeches and this dance was the result. Enjoy.

Room 2 Bike Riding

Room 2 Riding

Room 2 enjoying riding our bikes as part of the bike safety lessons.

Bike Safety Riding

Bike Safety Talk

Room 2 listening to Sarah about bike safety. Thanks Bigfoot Adventures for keeping us safe.

The Boys

Room 2 boys getting on well at lunchtime, well done lads.

Making Trick Sticks

Great fun yesterday making Trick Sticks. Well done  Room 2.  

We're Touring Sunnyhills with CoSpaces

This week we've been trying out CoSpaces an app that lets us build and code our own worlds.  We've been looking at ways to show how Sunnyhills Shines by providing people with insight into our special spaces at school. 

Many of us really enjoyed being able to use this app and created some pretty amazing spaces.  Here are a few photos of us getting started with CoSpaces... 

Take a look at some our spaces so far... 

The Field By Nessa, Chisan, Mikayla & Josh

Tree Island By Samuel and Joseph

The Swimming Pool By Ashley, Ella and Kathy 

The Library By Ryan

We're constantly editing these spaces, so pop back occasionally to see how we've improved them.  Click on the links to go directly to the space.  Remember you can view these spaces in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality just use the link on your phone in the CoSpaces app and using a Merge Cube if you're looking to watch in Augmented Reality.

A Great Conversation about Sustainability

We participated in another KidsEdChat on Twitter yesterday using our class account @SHS_Room2.  This week we talked about sustainability and what we're doing to help live a more sustainable life.  We created our own personal rubbish bags following a video created by a fellow KidsEdChat class.  We thought about what we were already doing at our school and what we could challenge others to do.  

These are the questions we were answering during the chat.  It would be great to keep thinking about these as the year goes on especially as we're an Enviro School and want to make a positive difference to the environment we live in.

1. What does sustainability mean to you?
2. What things do you do in your school that show sustainability?
3. How would you include sustainability practises into your day? Can you add some ideas of how you could help our environment to the padlet
4. Have seen any sustainable practises in you community?
5. Watch the video and take some time to make a rubbish holder post a photo of it if you can
6. List somethings that you could do at school to reduce your school’s carbon footprint.
7. What would you say to other students in your school about what they could do to develop sustainable practises at home and school?

Here are all the tweets that were made during the chat... 

Rare Earth Elements - Finding out More from a Scientist

Yesterday we were very lucky to get a visit from a Scientist - Dr Michael Rowe from the University of Auckland.    He teaches Earth Science at the University of Auckland.  You can find out more about him here

We were all really excited about having Michael come in and talk to us and we had lots of questions to ask him about Rare Earth Elements.  He was brilliant at answering all our questions, we now know even more about Rare Earth Elements.  

Some of the things we learnt were... 

• Praseodymium (Pr) is the rarest rare earth element
• Rare earth's aren't found by themselves they are usually in other minerals - they have to be blasted, crushed and dissolved out of other minerals to get them to their pure form
• The find in Japan is in mud, it's very different to the other Rare earth finds
• The find in Japan has about 5000 parts per million of Rare earth
• To extract the rare earth elements in Japan they could use a tool sort of like a vacuum cleaner to suck up the mud from the bottom of the sea.  They would then need to seperate the rare earth elements from the other elements in the mud.
• China has about 97% of the world's rare earth mines and supply.
• It can be dangerous to mine rare earth - rare earth elements can be found with radioactive materials
• There can be a lot of damage to the environment when mining rare earth elements.  Rare earth elements are found in small concentrations so there is a lot of waste associated with mining them
• Sometimes miners have to dig up a whole mountain just to find a small amount of Rare Earth Elements
• If we were looking at rare earth and how much of it is in the environment we could say that 2 1/2 people out of 28 students in our class might contain some  rare earth elements.
• If we were looking at 1000 marbles maybe 1 of them would be fairly pure rare earth.

Here are a few photos from the talk:

Watch this space, we're almost finished adding some more information to our Slide Decks and our What's in Your Device Boards so we'll post those to our blog soon.

Life Education Caravan

We had our first visit to the caravan today, I was so proud as the Room 2 students knew all the answers because of our pre-work. You all Rock Room 2. Check out the videos below to see some of the learning.

Life Education Articles

Here are the links to the articles we have also been using in our build up to the Life Education Caravan visit. Please read and discuss with your child.

http://www.lifeeducation.org.nz/uploads/item_resource/file/443/Resilience.pdf

http://www.lifeeducation.org.nz/uploads/resource/file/416/What_is_Self_Esteem.pdf

http://www.lifeeducation.org.nz/uploads/resource/file/415/Stress.pdf

http://www.lifeeducation.org.nz/uploads/resource/file/414/Peer_Pressure.pdf

Life Education Pre-Visit Videos

In Room 2 we have been getting ready for our visit to the Life Education Caravan, later this week.
These are the videos we have watched and discussed. Please talk to child about them at home as well.

Pink Shirt Day

Here we are pretty in pink!!!