Certificate Celebration

From now on the winners of class certificates will be celebrated on the blog instead of the school newsletter.
Our Week 5 winners are:
Values: Max Ansell
Heart of Achievement:Oliver Smith
Congratulations on your efforts boys.
The person who was recieving the achievement certificate this week was away. It will be handed out next week instead.

Balloon Blow-Up

Last week we mixed baking soda and vinegar in a bottle with a balloon on the top and watched the balloon blow up from the carbon dioxide that's produced. Some of the class wanted to know what would happen if we added more vinegar, so we tested this the next day. We put 1 cup of vinegar in a bottle, 2 cups in the next bottle and 3 cups in the last bottle. We added the same amount of baking soda to each one. The balloon on top of the 3-cup bottle popped off and the mixture flowed out of the top of the bottle. The other 2 balloons stayed on, with the 2-cup balloon getting the biggest. This told us that more vinegar = more carbon dioxide. This is another experiement that is easy and fun to try at home.

The Oobleck Trail!!

We had a visit from our buddy class (Room 27) this afternoon. We had re-generated our oobleck from yesterday so we took turns playing with it outside. Oobleck is a crazy mixture that looks and behaves like a liquid, but when you pick it up it feels like a solid. This is the oobleck trail that was left when the bell rang!!

This is the kind of mess that good fun makes. If you want to make some oobleck at home, here are some instructions that we wrote for writing this week:

How to Make Oobleck

You will need:

• Cornflour
• Water
• Food Colouring
• A large container

What to do:

1. First, put 6 cups of cornflour into the container.
2. Next, add 2 cups of water.
3. After that add 1 capful of food colouring.
4. Then stir it all up.
5. Finally, enjoy playing with it.

This recipe makes plenty of oobleck so you may want to halve it for use at home. Try adding more cornflour or more water and see what happens. Have fun!

Year 2 Sing-A-Long

Today the year 2 team had our sing-a-long to farewell the old hall. We invited our buddy classes and lots of family and friends came as well. All the children welcomed our guests with one of our school waiata - Anei Ra te Kura. After that each class had a turn on the stage singing 2 songs on their own. To finish the concert we all sang some of our favourite songs together. It was fantastic to see so many people in the audience. Thank you for coming. Here is a video of our two songs. The children can be proud of themselves for doing such a great job on stage.

Year 2 Sing-a-Long

On Wednesday we are having a concert in the hall with the other year 2 classes. It begins at 2pm and all family and friends are welcome to come along. One of the songs we will all be singing is Build me up Buttercup.  You can practise the song here:



You can also practise A Whole New World using the video that is already on the blog.

Disco Fever

Last Friday we had a "dis-go" to farewell the old hall before it is upgraded. The junior disco was HUGE!! There was dancing, singing, running, glow sticks, sausages and general chaos! A good time was had by everyone. Thanks to the PTA and the teachers who manned the lines at the door, sold sausages and glow sticks, and checked that everyone left in the safety of a parent. We can't wait till the next disco in our brand new hall.

Let's get Skipping!!

This week the school recieved a very generous donation from JB Anderson and Zumba Fitness to say thank you for the use of the school hall after the earthquake. This money was used to buy two class sets of skipping ropes. Room 16 are the first class to test them out. We are going to keep using them in fitness this term so that we can all become fantastic skippers. A huge thanks to JB and Zumba Fitness.

Science Science Science

This week we began learning how to carry out a science investigations. On Monday Miss Archbold showed us an experiment using milk, food colouring and dishwashing liquid. We put 3 different colours into a bowl of blue milk. Next we added a drop of dish washing liquid. The food colouring showed how the dishwashing liquid races around looking for the fat in the milk. We used this experiement to come up with our own investigations.

This is what we had to do:

1. Ask a question.
Our question was: "What would happen if we used a different liquid?" We decided to try green milk, flavoured milk, soy milk, cream and lemonade. The blue milk was used as our control.

2. Make a prediction.
We all made a prediction about the liquid that our group was going to test.


3. Make it a fair test.
We had to make sure that we kept everything except the liquid the same. We had to use the same amount of liquid, food colouring and dishwashing liquid. We also had to use the same sized container for each test.

4. Measure the results.
We decided to time how long it took for the food colouring to return to the middle of the bowl.
Here are our results:
Blue Milk - 2 mins, 53 secs.
Soy Milk - 3 mins, 35 secs.
Green Milk - Over 7 mins
Flavoured Milk - over 7 mins.
Lemonade - No movement at all.
Cream - No movement at all.

5. Analyse the results.
We decided that the colour moved for longer when there was less fat, because the dishwashing liquid had to hunt for longer before it found enough fat. This meant that the soy milk had a little bit less fat than the blue milk, and the green/flavoured milk had a lot less fat than blue milk. The lemonade had no movement because it has no fat at all. We know that cream has fat so the reason it didn't move was because the cream was too thick.

You could try an investigation of your own at home. You might change the amount of liquid, the size of the container, or the amount of dish washing liquid. Remember to keep the test fair by keeping all of the other ingredients the same.

Fun with Clay

On Thursday we had our first play with clay. We talked about where clay comes from and what we have to do to be able to work with it. We found out that it is much easier to work the clay when our hands are wet. Some people had their science minds switched on and were asking lots of questions about turning clay into a liquid and what happens once it has been fired. We experimented with the clay by pushing, pulling and twisting to see what happens.





















Next we made the surface of the moon and used the tools in our clay kits to add texture. After that we added moon men. Here are some very funky results.

Crumpet, the Cat

This week we have been reading Crumpet, the Cat for our big book. We have been working on reading together, looking carefully to make sure we are reading without mistakes, and using expression. We made a podcast of our reading.