Room1a's news by Charlotte and Molly

By Anya Matravers | Posted: Monday August 3, 2020

We have had a busy start to Term 3 in Room 1a, here are some of the things we have been learning about...

We have been learning lots of new things and we are going to tell you a bit about them. We have started learning about forces in science. We now know that each force has an equal and opposite force, such as buoyancy and gravity working on a boat. Gravity pulls the boat down and buoyancy keeps the boat afloat. Another example is air resistance and gravity, like when people are skydiving. Air resistance is a type of friction that acts on a skydiver's parachute to slow them down as gravity pulls them back to the ground.

Another thing we are learning about is water rockets. Our teacher signed our class up to do The Wonder Project. You are probably wondering what The Wonder Project is - The Wonder Project is a STEM challenge where classes from all around the country are learning about Newton’s Laws, the design process, and teamwork by designing and launching bottle rockets. You have a 1.5 litre soda bottle and you put water into the bottle to a certain amount, (we are learning about variables at the moment and how much is the perfect amount of water to put in) then we go to the backfield and launch the rockets with the launcher that The Wonder Project has kindly provided us. Part of this project has been learning about health and safety and what this means in different workplaces and how it applies to us. The Wonder Project says that we always have to wear safety gear, called P.P.E. (personal protective equipment) when we launch our rockets, so we wear safety glasses and hi-vis vests and have rules about how far away everybody needs to be. To launch our rockets we have to use a bike pump to pump up the pressure inside the bottle, this pressure is measured in P.S.I. (pound per square inch) and we are not allowed to go over 60 PSI which we measure using a pressure gauge, it’s great fun and our rockets have been flying really high! Next, we are going to work on designing our rockets to make them fly as far as possible.

We are also learning about changes as our PBL (project-based learning) project. Our driving question is: “How can we as logistics experts, make sure supplies travel through the school without getting in the way of students and teachers?” Right now we are working on solutions to the hotspot traffic areas of the school, such as the senior doorway after we have finished eating our lunch and are ready to put our lunch boxes away, or the sports shed when people want to get a ball out but people don't line up, and you can't forget the front gate at pick up time! All of these places are very busy with student movement at key times, how can we make sure supplies can still get around? 

This is our snapshot of what Room1a has been learning this term. 

By Charlotte & Molly 

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