In Kahikatea the other day we were remembering the super special times we had over Christmas. Ahhhh… Relaxing in the sun, bbqs, presents, ice creams, trips to the beach. But hang on! How come a lot of our Christmas cards had snow and snowmen on them? How come there were lots of people celebrating the holidays on TV while wearing really really bad jerseys? Why does Santa even have a sleigh?

Thanks to some Kahikatea kids having relatives in the Northern Hemisphere and some even experiencing ‘a white Christmas’, we figured out different hemispheres have different seasons at different times. For example, at Christmas time in NZ it’s summer but in the UK it’s winter!

We brainstormed why this could be and started to realise it was something to do with the Sun. Many of us knew that the Earth orbits the Sun. However, the big breakthrough came after studying our class globe. The Earth kind of leans over - it has a tilt. So right now NZ and the Southern Hemisphere is leaning closer to the Sun and that’s why we have summer now. The Northern Hemisphere is now tilting away so they are presently experiencing winter. In the middle of this year when Earth has travelled further round the Sun it will be the Norths’ turn to tilt towards the Sun while the South tilts away.

After a quick break we watched a YouTube clip and discussed how real snow is made. It was too hot for real snow to fall in the classroom but with the help of Chemistry we created fake snow! Chemistry is when you mix two or more substances together and something changes - and boy did we see a big change!

We mixed water with a powder called Sodium Polyacrylate (Cam called it Chemical X to be more dramatic). As soon as the two substances touched, the mixture swelled up and turned into fluffy, light, white stuff just like snow. This is because Sodium Polyacrylate is a super absorbent substance which loves sucking up liquid like water inside itself (osmosis) and swelling up. It was super fun to play with and it turned back into liquid for a short time when you squished it. Cam said we should treat fake snow just like real ‘yellow’ snow - DON’T EAT IT!