Rocket Science is coming to a DRAMATIC End

After 8 weeks of learning and experimenting with the four forces of flight: thrust, lift, weight and drag, students in Year 3 and 4 are designing, creating and testing their very own rockets. 

Here's one design described.

And another design...

To give the rockets the thrust they need, we are using a rocket launcher which is basically a steel tube connected to a powerful bike pump. 

Here's a explanation of how we will get thrust.

Next week we will be test firing our rockets, attempting to make them fly a distance of up to 60 metres.

Science of Flight

Testing Spinners

How can we make our spinner stay in the air the longest???

How can we fair test it to find out???\\

Looking for Leaves

Some the of the Year 4 Gardeners (Rosa, Eden, Zoe and Rochelle ) have been inquiring into:  

How do you make COMPOST? 

Compost is very important in a vege garden.  It is something you add to soil for plants to eat so they grow big and strong...and yummy.  

They found out that some of the main ingredients in compost are:

Dry leaves, green leaves, grass clippings and food scraps.   

PROBLEM!!!  We have lots of food scraps but not enough leaves or grass clippings.  Where oh where could we find leaves??? ......................................... ???????

Finally, after much deliberation, these kids thought of Mark the caretaker who seems to have a lot of leaves at his disposal everyday.

So, the gardeners sat down with him in the library,  joined forces and made a plan for Mark to put the leaves and any grass clippings from around the school into the food scrap bin or directly into the compost bin.  Now we can make loads of compost to feed the plants.

GREAT WORK KIDS - GOOD SOLUTION!!!

2011 Year 3 and 4 Cross Country

At last the Year 3s and 4s got to run their Cross Country. The kids have been training for the last 7 weeks, running laps of the school each morning with the aim to be the best runners they can be.

Mr Skilton organised an excellent and varied track.  The children got to run around Bishop's Park, over the sand dunes, down the beach and back through the park past the roaring crowd.  There certainly some very strong runners and everyone impressed the crowd with their efforts and perserverence.

WELL DONE TO ALL YEAR 3s and 4s FOR GIVING IT YOUR ALL!!!

Observational Drawing

We've started a rountine of doing a 10 minute observational drawing once a week.  First we choose an interesting object to draw, like a piece of fruit or your hand, and look hard at lines and shade you see.  Then we do a 10 second continuous line - blind drawing, a 30 second blind drawing and then a 2 minute line and shade drawing.  The rule of thumb is to only make lines on your page when you are looking at the object.  You can look down, but only to see where your pencil is.

Paper Plane Madness

The Unit on Flight is well off the ground.  

 

Last week we formally tested our best two paper planes in the hall.  To make it a FAIR TEST, we threw them: 

• from the same spot, 
• in the same direction, 
• with the same thrust and 
• at the same angle.  

We tested each dart 3 times so we got a reliable result.  We measured our throws using a long tape and measured to the nearest 10cm or tenth of a metre.

Lachlan took the longest throw award with a massive 12.6 metres.

 

Jia Wei took the most resilient scientist award; never giving up when his plane flew -1 metres.  He went on to modify his dart and flew over 6 metres.

Next, we will be designing our rockets using a 2L fizzy drink bottle.  We'll be using all we have learnt about aerodynamics - thrust, lift, weitght and drag.