An experiment for Santa

On Monday our class received a letter from Santa.
Santa told us that Rudolph is sick this year. He has caught a cold and won't be able to help pull the sleigh this year.
Santa asked us to find out which surface is the best surface for his sleigh to travel on.
Yesterday we did an experiment to find the solution to our problem.
We built a model sleigh and tried pulling it across different surfaces to see which would be easiest for the sleigh to go on.
We measured the size of the force with a Newton meter.

We used a Newton meter to see if it needed a big force or a small force.

We tried pulling the sleighs across surfaces like grass, sand, tiles, and soapy lino. We don't have any icy places in Australia because it is too hot, so we used soapy lino to make it slippery like ice.

We found out that some of the surfaces were better than others. It took a big force to pull along rough surfaces like sand, carpet and bitumen. It took only a small force to pull along smooth surfaces like lino, soapy lino and cement.

Today we are writing letters to Santa to tell him our recommendations.

We hope Rudolph gets better soon.

Soapy lino was easy to pull on. It only needed a little force. 

In the sand it was very hard to pull the sleigh because it kept getting bogged. 

The sleigh could slide along the grass but not as easily as on the soapy lino.

What games did Grandma and Grandad play?

Last week we wrote letters to our grandparents and posted them "the old-fashioned way". We asked them some questions to help us with our historical inquiry about how toys and games have changed since the past.
This week we have been very lucky to have received a number of replies already. We have been very excited to receive our letters and have been extremely interested in the answers to our questions.

 

We have discovered that our grandparents spent a lot of time playing outside. Some of them were children at about the time of World War II or just after this time so their families were quite poor and they didn't have many store-bought toys.

A common thing to play with seems to be the billycart. We think that building a billycart and racing it down a hill sound like a lot of fun but just a bit dangerous.

Travel back in time to 1938 and explore Colum's backyard on the My Place website to have a go at building and racing a billycart.

What games did your grandparents play? What toys did they have?

Mealworm Results

Today is the last day of our Mealworm Growing and Changing Experiment so we will announce the winner of the competition!

Today we have 3 mealworms, 2 pupae and 12 beetles in the classroom. This means Ella J's mum is our lucky winner. Thank you to all of our readers who participated. We had lots of good guesses.

We discovered that the mealworms in the fridge are not changing into pupae and beetles. Only the mealworms in the classroom are changing.

After we wrote our conclusions into our science journal we drew a diagram to show the life cycle of the mealworm (which we now know is the larva of a darkling beetle.

We really enjoyed learning about mealworms but Mrs Batham says we haven't finished learning about science yet. We wonder what other exciting things we will learn this term...

Hello From 2C

We are the students of 2C in Mrs Batham's class.
We are having lots of fun so far at school.
We have learnt about numbers. We have made a calendar for the month of February.
We have also been learning about the date.
This term we are learning about growing and changing in Science. We are very excited because we are learning about mealworms.
Last week we didn't know much about mealworms but now we know a bit more.
We know that mealworms have six legs.
We think they are an insect. They eat cereals like oats. They shed their skin. This is called moulting.

We can't wait to learn more about mealworms.
What do you like to learn about in Science?