Week 4 photos

Week Four - Field Session

Environmental Explorers-Week 4 Summary [17^th August]

Topic: What are the living things there? Who lives in the stream and why?

We started of this week’s session reviewing what we had done last time

Looking at things in a scientific way – magnifying and measuring

Questions?

How many metres in a km?  1000 metres

Why is a butterfly’s body fluffy? – we still couldn’t get answer and we decided to do some further research on this.

We also reviewed our safety rules

We explained how scientists group things – we grouped our own foot wear using bare foot, gum boots as the main groups. Then we looked at the difference between Abiotic / Biotic –- around into the trees and bushes, by the creek. Like a treasure hunt with clip board and listing living [biotic] and non-living things [abiotic] things. We got some really cool things – we asked what other category could we use? Some man made things came up?

W then looked at Biotic things animals, plants, fungi bacteria – most specifically animals - List all the animals that you can think of that live here

Consider the scientific grouping – what’s the difference – back bone –

-       vertebrate (mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians)

-       invertebrate (85% of all creatures, beetles, spiders)

We then went on to look at the animals in the stream – mostly invertebrates

Finding Macro Invertebrates in the stream – we used a range of equipment – magnifying glasses, nets and trays to sort out the animals. There was many invertebrates that went back to class to show the rest of the group

Key Wondering:

What can we say about the health of the stream?

Debrief; overview of scientific category’s and the invertebrates we have found –

What is Abiotic / biotic?

What is an invertebrate?

What was your favourite thing we saw today?

Week 2 - Field Session

Week 2 Field Session [3^rd August; 10am-11am] Summary

Topic: What can we see?

Our intension was to give the children a good 20 minutes to discover and wander around the park. We started on the far side of the stream (opposite side to the school). We told them the main question of the term “What effect does our school have on the stream and the surrounding area?”

How do we look in a scientific way? Ask lots of questions about what wee see and what we are looking at. Why???What do you notice about this area? Do you come down here? What do like? What do you not like? The only child that had not been there before was Nora. Tyler was very good at sharing her experiences and mentioned there is eels in the stream that hide under the pipes.

 We walked through the trees towards the bank. The trees had lost their leaves and we asked why? Oho was very clear in saying it was because of the seasons – it is winter now and leaves loosing their leaves – as we questioned further she even said that some trees were evergreen! There was lots of litter here we even found some paper from the school – the kids identified it too!

We wandered up to the bank and found some natives – interesting insects on the bark – there was 2 common crane flies – lying bottoms together which was really interesting, red berries from the miro tree and bright pink puriri flowers. A fantail came to say hello. We collected old dried seed pods too.

It was very muddy on the grass walking back to the stream. We recommend gum boots or bare feet in future

We discussed how to measure things properly – we had magnifying glasses, 50cm wooden rulers and 50 metre tape measures. We divided into 3 groups and walked to under the trees behind the school and practised measuring diameters of trees, using the magnifying glass to look closely at things and measuring smaller things with the wooden rulers. It worked really well and the kids were into a guided activity but being able to choose what they measured. Tyler was especially taken with a butterfly she found, and wanted to build a nest for it.

Debrief; what are we thinking about? What did we find that was really interesting and we want to investigate more? – write down 3 questions or 3 topics or things that we want to learn more about.

Main 2 questions to research during classroom time

·      How many metres in a km?

·      Why is the butterflies body all fluffy?

Week One's exploration