Exploring the Arts

This week we have been diving deep into the Arts as we start to get ready for the Arts Celebration in Week 5.

The Arts is one of my passions as I have been involved with improvised theatre and comedy for many years now. These days I don't have as much time for them and I always look for ways to explore them through the Arts curriculum. 

Check out some of the activities we got up to this week:

We tried dancing to different kinds of music. We had a mixture of fast and slow music and had to see how we might move along with our bodies.

We recorded some of the ways we were dancing

The next day we tried some skills in Drama. We played a game where we had to make an environment using our bodies. See if you can guess what we were trying to make?

Did you guess we were a playground. There is a swing, a flying fox, a trampoline, a slide, a dog being walked and a tree. Guess who got to be a tree?

We will be linking all these new skills to our inquiry learning next week and seeing how we can share our learning with you in some exciting new ways.

Putting the sizzle back in science

My favourite memories of science growing up were always the big flashy experiments. Igniting a balloon filled with hydrogen or burning magnesium strips. Exploring chemical reactions by making hokey pokey or growing crystals were always my favourites.

So in exploring how water changes state we knew that we needed to really show what happens when water meets heat to show the process of heat turning a liquid into a gas.

What better way than using the equipment right outside our classroom door. The barbecue is usually reserved for grilling up sausages on a Tuesday but on this lovely Thursday afternoon it would become a scientific apparatus.

When boiling a jug we observed steam coming out but couldn't see what was happening to the water.
Our purpose was to watch the water change from a liquid in the jug to a gas when it hit the hot barbecue. See what happens next...

After observing the change we raced back inside to record the beautiful descriptive vocab that Autahi were using to describe what they had seen. This will be used to help guide us as we prepare for the Arts Celebration later in the term.

Our inquiry cycle continues

As Term 3 begins, it's a great time for us to re-engage with our inquiry about the nature of water. Here is our Worser Bay inquiry cycle.

Our water inquiry sprang from our experience of planting and caring for our veggies in Term 1. We began wondering about where the water we were putting on our plants came from. We were in the 'I am curious' phase of our inquiry cycle, asking questions about where we find water, we use it for, how it looks and how it behaves.

As Term 2 progressed, we moved into the 'I am exploring' phase of our cycle. Here, we tried to find answers for some of our questions by sharing our knowledge and ideas about water, and beginning to do some experiments. We tried heating and freezing water. We played with ice and melted it. We boiled water and watched our water paintings in the playground disappear when the sun came out. We made a cloud in a bottle. The inquiry didn't stop during Lockdown with some of our families resourcefully splishing and splashing their way through water experiments at home.

We have discovered a lot about where water can be found and how it can be a liquid, a solid or a gas. We know how to turn it from one state to another. As we enter the 'I am sorting and creating' phase of inquiry, we are able to apply this knowledge to sort and classify different objects and materials in our world.

We have also been reflecting on how to describe water in its different states. What does ice look, feel and sound like? How is liquid water different?

With our Arts Celebration on the horizon in week 5, we are excited to begin taking our learning into the 'I am celebrating' phase of the cycle. Learning can be demonstrated in many ways. We are going to dial our Creativity up to eleven and share our ideas and discoveries through dance and drama. Creating our presentation will help to deepen and consolidate our inquiry learning, build our drama and movement skills - and should be a fun challenge, too.

We hope that you will be able to join us for the Arts Celebration (more details to follow). In the meantime, follow our progress on the Blog.