Rocket Launches with 9TGn

This term I've been teaching Third Rock to my Year 9 class. It's a thematic unit that combines learning about tectonic plates, convection, earthquakes, volcanoes, energy changes, rocket launches, speed distance time calculations, investigations, life on Mars, seasons and all kinds of things! 

I've been twiddling it as we go through based on the class in front of me, and due to the school-wide (and cluster-wide) goal of improving the literacy of all of our students. There's been lots of pair and group reading and discussing, story-writing and blogging which has actually been really enjoyable for me to learn about and design for them, and they seemed to increasingly enjoy engaging with it. 

Last week we had a wee cross-curricular sequence. I was absent for the first part where students were supposed to read their first scientific fact-sheet kind of text (our other texts have been stories, articles, methods and reports) about types of energy.

Because the end of term was rapidly approaching (and Y9 camp too!) I didn't have time to catch them up on my return, so instead they continued over to graphics the next day and built their rockets with Ms Fergusson and then the next day we launched them on the field with Mr Dunn! 

Here is a student's perspective of the rocket launch on their blog :) 

I tried to have a few quick chats about the different forms of energy while we were on the field watching each group's launch, and during our next lesson we did some more on energy changes and they completed the activity identifying energy changes in our school Kapa Haka performance (that they should have completed the day I was absent!)

For a Do Now during the review lesson I created a word-find after a request from the students. Word-finds are not very useful for learning, I think, unless maaaaybe for the spelling of words. So instead of giving them a list of words to find I changed it so they could approach the learning in two ways: 
1) go looking for familiar words in the word-find and then match what they found to the appropriate definition OR  2) identify what word they should be looking for based on the definition and THEN look for it in the word-find.

Click here for a link to the word-find.

Hotspot Animations

Today in our double period 9KMn made play-doh animations of Auckland's volcanic hotspot.

Auckland sits above a hotspot of magma, about 100km under our feet. 

A hotspot is an extremely hot area bordering the crust and the mantle, where temperatures are so high they melt the surrounding rock. There is a plume of hot rock rising out of the mantle as part of the mantles' constantly moving convection currents. It melts the rock and rises through the crust. It forces its way up to the surface and erupts to form a new volcano in Auckland.

How we made animations

Students used play-doh to create the crust, the hotspot, show rock melting, and showing the magma moving up through the crust to erupt at the surface. 

They set up the initial scence and took a photo using their Chromebooks. 

Then students moved the playdoh slightly, acting out what happens in the hotspot under Auckland. After each tiny movement another photo was taken.

One student got the job of adding each individual photo (one group took 51 photos!) to it's own Google Presentation slide. When the presentation is shared to the internet and plays automatically, it looks like a stop-motion animation! 

The final step was to add a few slides at the end of the animation for each student in the group to explain what their animation showed. The student who had added the photos to the presentation shared it to the other students in the group with full editing rights, and students were able to add their paragraph all at the same time (using their own words of course)

Students share their creations

Autymn, Nathan, Paris and Dante made an animation and Auymn posted about it on her blog here.

Please go and leave Autymn's group a comment about what you liked, learned or even what they could improve on next time we make stop-motion animations! 

New Year 9's - 9TSt

Today the 2015 Tamaki College Year 9's arrived, and I got to meet the new Totara recruits.

9TSt doesn't know it yet but I'm their science teacher twice a week! I'm looking forward to meeting them properly on Monday morning, period 1. 

They seem like a lovely bunch, and it looked like they were having fun with the icebreaker games, lead by our Year 13 student leaders.

Some of the games they played were:

~ Song Battles

Teams were all given the same word (love, boys or girls, and colours) and had to compete against one another to remember and sing snippets of as many songs with those words in them as possible (e.g. for 'colours' one team sang 'black and yellow black and yellow...')

~ Bang

Standing in a circle students quickly had to learn the names of the people around them, because whoever had their name called had to quickly duck, while the people on either side had to shoot across their head as fast as possible, to shoot the other person before the other person shot them!  

~ Straight-Faced Compliments

Two people faced each other while everyone lined up behind them. Then the two people had to compliment one another without laughing! Lots of people were complimented on their hair, their teeth, their... nostrils!?

Tamaki College goes to the Science Fair

On Friday 29th August I had the privilege of transporting 9KEm to their Science Fair competition at Fickling Convention Centre in Three Kings.

Students had spent weeks planning, preparing, collecting data, analysing, concluding, printing and pasting to get their projects finished in time for the school science fair.

Ms Smallwood held this in S3 last Friday, and students were able to practice their interview skills as some guest judges walked around, asked them about their projects and gave them some feedback. 

All of the projects had such creative names and they were all so different, the guest judges were all very impressed. Some of the projects included finding out which type of bowl degraded the fastest (interestingly, not the one called the 'biodegradable' bowl!), which type of bowl helped whisk egg whites the fastest and the highest, which fertiliser helped plants grow the tallest, which genre of music caused bacteria to grow the most, whether texting affected finger dexterity and which soil is most affected by liquefaction?

However, even after their practice the week before some students were still nervous on the way to meet with the real judges - "excitedly nervous," as one of them put it. Would the real judges ask them even harder questions? Would they like their ideas? 

Watch the video below to find out from students as they return from the judging room:

A big huge thank you to Ms Smallwood from all the Science staff and all the students! Ms Smallwood single-handedly organised the science fair students and projects at Tamaki College. Thanks for all of your hard work and extra after-school efforts! 

Finally, in breaking news, it appears that the dedication of Ms Smallwood and her science stars has paid off! Hopefully the science fair students have been checking their results on this website - but I will leave it to Ms Smallwood to announce on Monday. Congratulations Tamaki winners!

Making Ice-Cream - Easy!

All three of my Year 9 classes finished their Chemical Reactions unit on Friday, and we decided it was time for a treat for working so hard!

9PLa and 9PTt got to make ice-cream after Latiume sent me this link and requested to make ice-cream, and 9RTd got to launch rockets with Mr Grace in their Friday class!

I was so impressed by how 9PLa and 9PTt worked together to help set up their bags of ice-cream, which you can clearly see in the photos below. The recipe for ice-cream is not difficult, and some of the students even said they would make it at home again!

Everybody helping one another with the measurements - it is difficult to do alone!

Trey helping Lasa measure the vanilla essence.

Everyone doing the measurements.

Once the two bags were all set up students had to keep shaking them to make their ice-cream creamy!

Suzie enjoying her ice-cream in the sun.

Latiume and Tyrone were pretty happy with the outcome of their effort.

Reactants for the small ziplock bag:

1/2 cup blue milk

2 tablespoons of sugar

1 teaspoon of vanilla essence

Reactants for the larger ziplock bag:

Three handfuls of ice

1/4 cup rock salt

Method:

1.   Place all of the reactants for the small ziplock bag into it.

2.    Make sure the small ziplock bag is COMPLETELY sealed.

3.  Place all of the reactants for the larger ziplock bag into it.

4.  Place the smaller ziplock bag into the larger bag. 

5. Shake the larger bag from the corners, try not to touch the ice too much - it's very cold!

6.  Shake until you can feel the milk has hardened into an ice-cream-like texture.

Product:
Vanilla Ice Cream

Word Equation:
milk+sugar+vanilla essence --> vanilla ice-cream

Conclusion:

The science behind this chemical reaction is that mixing ice and salt causes the ice to be able to melt into water while it is still at the temperature of ice - below 0 degrees. Try not to touch the freezing cold ice-water while shaking the bag, as it can cause second or third-degree burns similar to frostbite. The ice-cream tasted really nice, but some bags had a slight salty taste because there was some salty water sitting in the crease of the ziplock bag, which fell into the ice-cream when it was opened! 9PLa would advise you to wash the bag before opening it, while I quite enjoyed the slightly salty ice-creamy taste; kind of like salted caramel. Yum!