Author: Mrs Harrison-Zdunczyk

We finished off STEM week by finishing our parachutes and launching them off of the balcony above the street. We discussed how our landings went and how we could improve our parachutes in future. This helped us understand the purpose of a parachute on rover landings in space.

We also did the Coca Cola and Mentos experiment where a physical reaction takes place. Lots of hydrogen gas is expelled from the drink causing a huge explosion! This looked very similar to the rockets on the bottom of the Perseverance lander. The force of the rockets prevents the lander from crashing into the surface of Mars.

When thinking about space we also read some books about aliens and then did a collaborative drawing where we created our own aliens.

We finished off our space art today and added images and pictures to our galaxy background. Some learners added the rover itself, astronauts, space rocks and the craft which the rovers were launched in. A parachute is used to safely land the rover and stop it from crashing into the surface of the planet.

We also started engineering out own parachutes which we will finish tomorrow.

Today we learned about gravity. We watched some interesting videos about the new Mars rover, Perseverance, and its mission to mars. We also learned about Felix Baumgartner’s jump from space. Gravity helped Felix come back to earth and the Mars rover to land safely on Mars.

We tried to beat gravity by using the back of our hand (a push force) to tap the balloons into the air. We built Mars rovers using loose parts and we created gravity paintings using cups and paintbrushes. The paint drips to the earth as gravity is pulling it!

The cups acted as a pendulum which was pulled by the force of gravity.

For day 1 of STEM week we decided to do a building competition.

Last week we all discussed as a class the type of activities that we wanted to do as part of STEM week. Building is a very popular play activity and lots of P1.2 love building really tall towers.

Using different materials we got into teams and through play we built lots of towers. By trying to build towers with different construction materials we discussed how it was easier to build with certain things than others, how some blocks and materials were slippy and smooth, and how others we could join together to make more secure. We thought about tall buildings around the world and how they start with a bigger base and then get thinner as they go up. The foundation of a tall building is very important.

Lots of the towers fell down a few times and we had to problem solve on ways to keep them up, even when they were very tall.

We measured the towers to find out who the winner was. Here are the results of the teams who participated.

1st Place – Jordan, Yaseen, Eshan, Subhan – 1m 31cm (1.31m)

2nd Place – Eva and Sally – 1 m 20cm (1.2m)

3rd Place – Kai, Adam, Hanna and Alexander – 1m 11cm (1.11m)

4th Place – Ali, Cian, Noah, Brodie – 1m 4 cm (1.04m)