POP! - Bubble fun

For our focus on the letter P this week we have been learning about things that can "Pop!" especially bubbles. 

Here are some photos from our bubble fun on Thursday afternoon. We practiced our controlled bubble breathing so we could blow the bubbles and used pipe cleaners to make our own bubble wands - experimenting with size and shape to see which blew the best or the biggest bubbles. 

Some children even experimented with using their hands to blow the bubbles and others raced to see if they could run as fast as the bubbles could float.

Learning through play - Float or sink

This week we used our prediction skills to guess whether objects would float or sink when we placed them in water. Then we did an experiment and actually put these things into water to see if our hypothesis was right. 

Learning through play - learning to be a scientist

During Learning Through Play time this week we tried a scientific experiment.

We learnt that to act like a scientist we needed to observe, ask questions, make a hypothesis (what we think will happen), do an experiment and report our results.

This week we looked at some baking soda and smelt the coloured vinegar. As we observed we noticed that the baking soda was white and dry and the vinegar looked like juice but smelt really bad. 

We asked what will happen if we put some vinegar on the baking soda and we hypothesized that it might change colour, get wet or explode. 

Next we each had a go at trying the experiment before we reported our results by drawing what happened. 

You can see some of the photos of our experiments and read some of Team Awa's quotes.

"Its exploding!"

"It sounds like fizzy drink"

"It look like coca-cola"

"Eww! It's stinky"

"It's changing colour"

"Eww! It smells even stinkier now"

"The blue and the red made purple fizz"

"It made fizzing"

"Wow!"

"It's mixing, it's making Aqua."

"They are making fizz, yukky fizz"

"Mine is making dark brown"

"It stinks"

Learning through play - Flight

Over the last few weeks we have been exploring the science of  flight during our learning through play time. This was something the children were interested in learning about, after a small group tried to make planes last term and wanted to know why they did not fly very far. 

We explored paper rocket ships and how we could use our breath to make them fly higher or further each time, some students even managed to control the direction their rockets flew by changing the angle of the straw and how hard they breathed. 

During the next week we made paper helicopters as our flying machines. These helicopters spun around and around as they fell to the ground after being thrown into the air. Next we made paper planes and learnt how we had to throw them gently and flat for them to fly the best. Some planes still managed to fly a loop before landing which added to the children’s questioning as to why they did that and how they could make theirs fly in that direction too.