Paper Planes

Our science unit this term has been all about floating, sinking, rolling and flying. We have been learning all about gravity, thrust, lift and aerodynamics and have been putting our learning in to action as we try to make a successful paper plane.

Mrs Hannah has shared some secrets to making a great paper plane and, as we experiment with our designs, our planes are getting better. We investigated the world record for a paper plane and found out that the record was a distance of around 69 metres! We measured this distance in our playground with a trundle wheel and we were gobsmacked by how long it really was.

At the end of term we plan to have a paper plane competition where there will be categories for furthest throw, heaviest weight bearer and best decorated plane. Until then we will keep trialling our design until we create our best prototype.

Swim School

Earlier in the term all of Year 2 spent two weeks at Swim School. This was an amazing program where we learnt so much! Firstly, we learnt a lot about getting ourselves organised and looking after all of our gear. Some of us were very bad at organising ourselves at the start of Swim School but by the time we had done it every day, we were experts! Mrs Hannah and Miss Norris were very proud of us!

We also learnt a lot about swimming and water survival skills. Each day we had pretty good weather and we really loved the chance to have a dip in the water! At the end we were tested on our swimming ability and everyone received a certificate. We loved Swim School and really wish we could go every year!

Art show success!

Last week, Merewether Heights Public School held our biannual art show. Each student had an artwork framed for display and each glass created a group item. The students and community were then invited to view all of our artworks.

Our class item was called ‘The Thinking Chair’. We all created lots of different ‘mini’ artworks and Mrs Hannah stuck them to a wooden chair. We were delighted with the end result and lots of people commented on ‘The Thinking Chair’ during the art show. The chair was placed in a silent auction and there were quite a few bids for it. Mrs Hannah even wanted it for our classroom! The lucky bidder was someone from our very own OOSH so we can still visit our masterpiece in the OOSH room.

The MHPS art show was an amazing success and we loved seeing all of the other classes amazing creations.

Clever clarinet player!

Last week one of our spelling words was ‘clarinet’. 2H are very lucky that they have a clever clarinet player in their class and this musician was able to play his clarinet and explain the parts of the instrument. We really enjoyed Alex’s little concert and we thought he was an amazing musician.

Groovy Grassheads

We made some Groovy Grassheads during our open classroom day. We had to follow a procedure and needed to use a cup, some soil, a stocking and some grass seeds to construct our little friends.

We have been patiently watering our Grassheads and they are finally starting to grow! We found it very interesting that some grew really quickly, whilst others took a long time to get started. We discussed some reasons for this and we thought it may be because some people used more seeds, some people watered theirs more or because some Grassheads were in very sunny positions.

We are looking forward to giving these guys a haircut soon!

Gardening Fun!

2H decided to take over the school vegetable gardens and grow some herbs and vegetables. First we needed to weed and clear the gardens and get the soil ready for planting. Next we planted a variety of seedlings and ensured we watered them really well.

Now the job is to keep them growing! We check our gardens regularly for weeds and snails and we try to water every few days. We are also starting to make some pretty cool scarecrows to decorate our gardens. We will update our blog with some pictures of our scarecrows when they are finished.

Marvellous Monkeys!

We are learning about how living things grow and change in our Science & Technology unit. All of the Stage 1 classes at our school are investigating the way Sea Monkeys can grow and change. Sea Monkeys are very tricky creatures that only come to life when they are added to water!

We have been learning all about Sea Monkeys in reading groups too. Did you know that they are a type of Brine Shrimp? Or that the male Sea Monkeys grow whiskers? They really are fascinating creatures!

We are conducting an experiment to see whether Sea Monkeys grow better in the dark or in light. We have placed one of our tanks in a dark spot and one of our tanks in the light. We have made some predictions and we are taking observations to see which Sea Monkeys grow most successfully.

Secret Class Business

2H have started work on a ‘secret project’. Here are some of our students wearing masks and undertaking some special work. We look forward to sharing our ‘secret project’ with you in the coming weeks! Shhhhhhh…it’s a secret!

Bats, bats, bats!

We are learning all about living things this term and Mrs Hannah thought we’d start with some learning about bats. Mrs Hannah wanted to know how much we already knew about bats so she got us to start a K-W-L chart.

This was our first time using a K-W-L chart but we got the hang of it really quickly. Mrs Hannah was super impressed with how much knowledge we already had about bats! We know lots and lots of facts!

We then told Mrs Hannah all of the things we want to know about bats and we had heaps of questions. Mrs Hannah read a book called Stellaluna which is a text all about a baby bat. The baby bat befriends some birds and has lots of adventures and some troubles.

We are looking forward to learning more about bats to add to our knowledge.

Holiday Chat and Visualising

Wow, members of 2H had a great time on their Winter school holidays! On Monday we did an activity called Holiday Chat where we buddied up with a classmate and we told each other all about our break. While the other person was chatting we had to visualise what they were talking about and draw it on our whiteboards. We then got to share our drawings with the whole class and they had to try and guess what each drawing represented.

Some people were great at sketching the activities their partner had done whilst others did some quite interesting drawings. Luckily, they had been good listeners and could explain their drawings! This was a great speaking and listening activity and we loved chatting to our friends about their holiday adventures!