Term Two Inquiry
Kaitiakitanga
Hook
Woo hoo! It's Term Two!
Mrs Peck sent us a letter thanking us for our hard work last term and told us all about the exciting things we have happening in this term.
In Week 8, we will be having an Open Evening and a Hangi to celebrate Matariki. Mrs Peck also told us that we are getting a new native garden planted down the far end of Poutama. She knows how responsible we are and asked us if we could be the Kaitiaki of the garden. Mrs Peck has asked that we explore some of the science around how to care for the garden and has asked that share our learning with our whānau on the Open Night.
We told Mrs Peck, we'd love to be Kaitaki of the garden. We just need to figure out what a Kaitiaki actually is! We better get busy. We have a LOT to learn!
Wonder
We re read Mrs Peck's letter. There are really three different components to what she would like us to do. So we asked ourselves the following questions:
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What do we know about the Māori Kaitiaki?
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What do we know about the Scientific Process?
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What do we know about collecting and presenting information?
We brainstormed all our ideas...
We got together as a team and collated all our ideas:
Explore
The Science Process
Some of us began our Explore phase by learning about the Scientific Process. First we watched a video that explains exactly what the Scientific Process is. Take a look...
Wonder
Our next task was to read a little scenario and work out which part of the Science Process it would be. It was a tricky task, but luckily in Poutama, we are always up for a challenge!
Now that we know what each step of the Science Process is, we need to give each step a go. That's right! It is time to EXPERIMENT...
Today we went through the different stages of the Scientific Process with Mrs Lunn. We watched a video on the experiment we were doing today:
We went through the Scientific Process and filled out the different stages on our sheet. We had to write up what our aim was and make our hypothesis. Our hypothesis is our best guess about what we think will happen. We wrote down the materials needed and the method. Then it was time to experiment!
We had mixed results: 😂😂😂
It doesn't matter if things don't go as planned. There is so much learning to be done from when things fail.
Kaitiaki
Mrs Whitta's roopu started their Explore phase by diving head first into our Māori Kaitiaki. Who are they? Why are they important to us in Aotearoa? First, we watched a video that explained who are Kaitiaki are and what they represented.
Our next mahi was match the pikitia (pictures) to their ingoa (name). This brought on a lot of discussion about who our Kaitiaki are and what they represent.
Mahi tuarua was to look at the kaitiaki and link the Science to them. Where does the Sciecne fit? Our ākonga were given the task to put the pikitia with the "correct" kaitiaki. As long as each pikitia could be justified then our ākonga were correct. This started a lot of discussion about who was right. He tika tau!
Mahi tuatoru, add our own whaakaro (thinking/ideas) to the powerpoint slides and start thinking about what we can do or create to become kaitiaki for our own māra (garden).
Graphs
Mr Lion's roopu started their Explore phase by discussing what we already knew and what we wanted to know about graphs. Tamariki were already coming up with some great questions that they would like to learn about.
We then had a go at making a bar graph. We learned that bar graphs need to be labelled with a title and on the axis so we know what the information means.
After we made a one, we completed our checklist of important points and then did an activity to discuss the benefits and drawback of certain types of graphs. We had a great time comparing and deciding which ones we liked best.
Reflect
At this stage of the process, it is really important to stop and reflect on all we have learned. We also took some time to come up with the success criteria for the task ahead.
Reflect
The last part of our Science Inquiry was to complete our REFLECT sheet. We needed to decide if our project fitted the Success Criteria. Once again our teachers were very impressed with our honesty as to where we feel we sit on the Success Criteria Matrix.
