In the Classrooms

Langley
What a busy week of investigation and discovery we have had! Over the last couple of weeks the children have been investigating how light moves and how shadows are created on the overhead projector.
“It’s Tommi!” said Tommi excitedly as he found his shadow on the wall
“It’s Gabe!” added Gabe, as he showed Tommi
This week we made our first visit to the dark room to further explore light and shadows. The children have discovered that when you put something on top of the overhead it gets much, much bigger when it appears on the wall.
“Look Mid Jess my hands big!” said Oliver L
“Yeah, big hands!” agreed Jack O
I wonder what we can make big next week!
Kind regardsJess, Adele, Kerry and Jennifer

Mead
Dear Mead Room Parents,
We have had another busy week exploring and investigating. Building with transparent blocks in the dark room, creating patterns on the light table, seeing the world through coloured shapes, looking at shadows and images on the over head projector. The children loved exploring the dark room (art room).

“I liked the silver tubes best because I didn't know where I was going.” Jesse
“The dinosaurs glowed different colours.” Jade
“Wow, look at them coloured tubes.” Henry
“I don't know what I'm building till I'm finished.” Jesse

We have also drawn self portraits while looking at ourselves in mirrors. It will be interesting to compare these to our self portraits from earlier in the year.
Best wishes,
Emma, Susan and Emma

Cooper
This week the Cooper children have been busy builders this week creating all sorts of big constructions. They have played with duplo and building blocks to make towers, zoos, airports and roads and have made 'princess castles' on the light box with small blocks and shiny materials. Outside, they used the big block set to build a large wall and a dinosaur mountain. It has been lovely to see the children beginning to work collaboratively on their projects, sharing ideas and adding to each other's work. Of course, when you're three it's also fun to see the effect of knocking things down and making a loud crash and everyone has enjoyed participating in that too!
Kind regards,
Ali and Susan

Chapple
The Chapple Room have been learning about how light can move through certain objects and how it can’t move through other objects. We have learnt to use to use the words ‘transparent, ‘opaque’ and many of us can also use and describe objects that are ‘translucent’. We created our own stained glass windows – you can see them on our classroom windows – they’re very beautiful. Ms Giorgio thought it would be a great idea to go and inspect the real glass ones in the Chapel. They also are very beautiful, but we like our designs just a fraction more!
On top of that, we began using mirrors to understand the idea of reflection. Some of us held them under our eyes and used the reflection from above to navigate our way from Chapple Room to the swing set and back. This proved to be a very exciting and scary experience with lots of giggling along the way. From this we also discovered that light can bounce from mirrors onto something else. As a class we tried to replicate torch light onto the walls of our room by pointing the torch light at the mirror and not directly at the wall!

“Everything’s moving. The roof is on the ground and it feels funny,” described Max experiencing the sensation of not being able to see his feet and use his eyes in the normal way to get from one point to the other.
Sebastian giggled, “I’m scared because I’m going to fall down on the roof. Now we’re going to fall on the tree! The sky! We’re going to fall on the sky!”
“It feels like I’m standing on top of the roof. It’s like we’re trapped there. The mirror makes everything look like we’re all upside-down and I think it’s because of the mirror,” said Kyle in a quiet but excited voice.
Kind regards,
Kate and Juliana

Edgerley
We were very busy boys this week in Edgerley with lots of independent investigations occurring around the room. Aadi, Jamison and Hugo were using lamps and globes to investigate how the sun shines onto our earth to create day on one side whilst it is night time on the other side.
After Louie and Noah’s discovery that some of the things that give us light also give us heat we tested the theory with a birthday candle. They were right, candles give us light and heat at the same time too. We are on the look out for other things that give us light and heat.
After our observations of candles we watched a video about fire safety and this encouraged lots of dramatic fire man play in the block corner. We learned how to dial 000 (and will continue to practice this next week) but we are still learning the numbers and street and suburb names of our houses (our Mum’s and Dad’s can help us with that) and how to STOP COVER DROP and ROLL to put out fire on our clothes.
Meanwhile in the dark room as the children experimented with translucent paddles Roshan decided to create a rainbow. He worked, mixing the paddles to create orange, green and violet to finish the rainbow.
Wow, we wonder what next week will bring!
Regards
Mel and Rosalie