Year 7 & 8 Experiential Literacy

Art & Craft

What happens when students are given six cans of shaving foam to squirt onto paper plates with dye? Not only lovely smelling foam pies, but beautiful foam marble prints, to be turned into works of art. We have also modelled salt dough into figurines including dumplings, steamed buns, cutlery, donuts, cartoon characters, animals and vegetables to name a few - creativity abounds! The ones that exploded in the oven... we’ll call ‘abstract dough modelling’. Lastly, we have been making juggling balls (or stress balls) using sand and balloons. Thank you to Wesley and Ric for vacuuming up after us!

Messy Science

In Science, we get to do lots of cool and exciting experiments! Mr Russell, AKA the best science teacher in the world, leads us with easy-to-follow steps, but the experiments are amazing. We got to make the mysterious oobleck and look at its properties, make simple but brilliant paper gliders and blow up balloons, then make them travel on string at incredible speeds! But, it’s not over yet, there will be even more exciting experiments waiting to be done! When the experiments are done we write a procedural report. It is important that the headings are all there. The headings we use are Aim, Hypothesis, Equipment, Results and Conclusion. We write up the results using “command verbs”. It's so much fun, and you should definitely join if you can. Written by Joey Year 7

Cooking and Master Chef

In cooking, the students have been writing their own recipe books and have of course been taste testing the delicious results of their hard work. Some tasty kumara curry was seen walking out of the gate yesterday afternoon. Yum! They have loved participating in master chef!

Environmental Science - Water Quality Testing

On Monday morning a group of 24 year 7/8 students travelled to Corfe Reserve to test the quality of the river water. The students, who had opted into the activity as part of a literacy unit on procedural texts, tested the flow, clarity and depth of the river. They also examined the percentage of gravel to sediment and assessed the river for periphyton and invertebrates. The results, which are still being collated, will determine the overall health of the river. At the moment, its health is looking a little dubious. Our favourite moments included looking at invertebrates, using the periscope and getting warm and dry after over an hour of standing in the river! Our low points were finding a large number of man-made items in the river and realising that the river was flowing very slowly. We are looking forward to giving the river an overall health rating and learning how to keep our rivers clean and clear.

EPro8

Congratulations to our Year 7 & 8 EPro8 team who have put many hours into constructing their Robotic Spider Monkey Zoo Animal. They managed to mechanise the tail and arm using cranks and a reel system. Fantastic team work and innovation. Best of luck with your entry. The Year 5 & 6 team took great pleasure in dismantling this creation, ready to launch into their competition entry.