Norwood Tractor Visit 14/08/18

On Tuesday afternoon the CEO of Norwood Tractors came to visit YMS, giving us an opportunity to welcome him to our school and say thank you in person to he and the Norwood Tractor staff for their generous sponsorship of our carb break initiative.  Our Kapa Haka group, with the Matua's help, led the school in formally welcoming them the visitors to our school.

The visitors then toured our classrooms and spoke with us about our learning.  This week as part of our Maths Week activities we have been using our maths knowledge to draw up our own plans of what we would like in the new school garden.  Our visitors were very interested in our plans when they were in our class and asked us lots of questions.  Their company is going to be providing some help with getting the new garden area outside the Te Māhuri block underway.  We were glad to be able to share our ideas with them. 

We finished off our lesson by sharing our ideas with each other and looking for the most popular suggestions of what to plant in our new garden.  These ideas have now been shared with the rest of the school as part of our 'student voice' in the design process of the garden.

Term 3 Week 3 - Setting up our Science Experiment

On Friday we completed the next step of our science experiment.  To make growing wheat seeds into an experiment we needed to first think about what we knew about the things plants need to grow healthy and strong.

We worked with our talking buddies and then shared back to the class and made this list of the things we think plants need to grow best:
* Sunshine
* Water
* Soil
* Caring
* Worms

From this list we decided the main thing we could change about how the wheat seeds could be grown in our classroom environment was the soil.  So we will be experimenting to see what type of soil the wheat seedlings will grow best in.

Each group has 2 seedlings growing in sand, 2 seedlings growing in normal garden soil (from the current school garden) and 2 seedlings growing in a potting mix.  We will be looking to see if the type of soil makes a difference to how big and strong the wheat seeds grow.  We put the other pots in a box on top of the cubbies to also see if less light will make a difference to how big and strong our wheat seeds grow.

Link to Experiment Slides

  

Term 3 Week 2 - Sprouting Success!

Our wheat seeds have been so well cared for by TM1 and are obviously in a great place for growing.  We have lots of seeds germinate and some are getting pretty tall.  Please come and visit the class and see for yourself!

Our next step for our experiment is to record some observations about what we have noticed and then plant some of the seedlings up begin our experiment.