An energetic afternoon!

Yesterday, Vector, the energy company, brought one of its school programmes, Be Sustainable with Energy, to Ruapotaka for Years 6, 7 and 8. We learnt about the different sources of energy that Vector uses to make electricity in New Zealand. Prudence, Saluselo, Zion, Katrina and Tyron created electricity using mechanical energy as they turned mini-turbines, while Pupuke and Azahar demonstrated how solar power can be used to turn the rotors on a model helicopter. What an energetic afternoon!

S'more sun required!

The sun shone brightly on our solar ovens yesterday as we tried to cook pizza and chips using the sun's energy. We left the food in the ovens for an hour before lunch and the results varied for different groups. Everyone's shoestring chips were warm but as some pizzas had more cheese than others, not all the cheese melted!

Today it was time for dessert - solar s'mores. Although the sun disappeared behind cloud at the beginning of our one hour "cooking" session, the marshmallows were warm and the chocolate gooey and melted!  We learnt that we can use the sun's energy to cook some food but that hot chips need s'more sun to be perfect!

What's cooking?

Cardboard, cling film, newspaper, tin foil: what are we cooking up here? We have created our solar ovens. This week we are hoping the sun will shine to see how they harness the power of the sun.

What time is it?

The sun was shining ... we were thinking about Maui slowing the sun. We were reminded about the history of time, clocks ... and sundials. Can we tell the time using the sun?

We discovered that we can tell the time using a sundial ... on a sunny day ... but that the shadow moved "the wrong way" (anti-clockwise) because we live in the southern hemisphere!

Now that this time has passed, we're waiting for another sunny day to find out how challenging it is to harness the sun's energy.

Science or pseudoscience?

After the Wild Things read an interesting article about pseudoscience in Fact or fiction, we decided to do an experiment described in the article to see if low-fat chips have less fat than ordinary chips.

We had to measure out 25 gram portions of each type of chips for each group. Then, we had to crush the chips with a rolling pin between some grid paper and greaseproof paper. We had to leave the crushed chips on the paper for 2 minutes. Next we had to draw around the edge of the oil patch on the grid paper.  When we looked at the oil patches, the spread of the oil for the low-fat chips was less than the spread for the full-fat chips. We think that there is less fat in low-fat chips but we are not sure how much healthier they are than ordinary chips. We enjoyed eating all of the chip crumbs after all that science!

Thank you Tyron and Kuini for helping to write this blog post.

Making cress seeds by Elisha

We were learning about how plants grow and seeds sprout. We grew cress and sprouted broad beans in class. We watched how water moves through plants by putting celery in coloured water.

This is how my cress changed over time.