Timelapse

We have explored the time lapse app 'Lapseit' on our i-Pads.
In small groups we drew, built and made different things and made timelapse movies using lapseit.
We have watched lots of time lapse videos of the stadium being built, fruit rotting, people aging.
On the app, we could control how often the pictures were taken. The children made excellent connections to rate of change. Lapseit is a free app if you have an i-Pad and want to use this at home.

Tim said when you take a time lapse of something like the stadium being built you would only take one picture every few hours. Some of us set the i-Pads to take pictures every 20 milliseconds, we were doing activities that were quick so we had to take a lot of photos in a short space of time.

Exploring Symmetry

People in our class noticed that lots of the kowhaiwhai patterns were symmetrical.

We have talked about symmetry before, but we hadn't explored it. Mrs Walker gave each thinking partner pair a sheet of photocopied pictures that all had lines of symmetry.

We rotated all of them both 1/2 and 1/4 turns to see if they looked any different, or if they looked as if they had been translated.

Some looked the same if they were rotated 1/2 and 1/4 turns.
Some looked the same when they were rotated a 1/2 turn but not a 1/4 turn.
Some you could tell they had been rotated on each and every rotation.

We wondered why, we had to look closely and look for a pattern, which we learnt to do in Term 1 when making observations.

Ryan said all the sides of all of the objects were the same.
Marley said the ones that look the same on 1/2 turns have two opposite sides that are the same.

Mrs Walker said these shapes had rotational symmetry. The number of times a shape is the same as it rotates is called the shapes' order of symmetry. We worked out the order of symmetry for our shapes and images. We have some impressive thinkers in our room.

Thank you Marley and Jacob for leading us on this investigation with your carefully observations and questions.

Lantern Designs

We wanted to design little lanterns for our Matariki night. We have been learning about kowhaiwhai and tukutuku patterns and the beautiful geometry behind this artwork.

We explored so many patterns and the children described what they saw. Some saw fish, arrows, curls, ferns etc. Then we learnt the meanings of some of the more famous patterns. Most people loved patiki (flounder).

Then we learnt about 'translation' as a mathematical word to describe how a shape or pattern moves.
We all got a little game from Mrs Walker and played it with our thinking partner, we had to translate each shape in our game and explain it to our partner, but they were not allowed to look, they had to try to make it from our description.

Later Mrs Walker taught us about rotation, and we were able to link this to our learning about clocks, 1/4 and 1/2 turns, anticlockwise and clockwise.
We added these moves to our game.

Then we learnt about reflection, we are so good at the game now and everyone understands and can use this language.

We made patterns of our own on our lanterns.

Jacob and Marley noticed that in the game sometimes you can't really tell if a shape has been translated or rotated because it looks the same anyway. We wondered why this was so that will be our next investigation.

Sorting and Categorising

We have been sorting rocks into rock classification groups: sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic. Now it is time to sort other knowledge and see if we could understand how the year is organised around the seasons and why.

We have been sorting holidays:

• We have sorted holidays into the different seasons. 
• We have sorted holidays based on whether they are celebrations or commemorations. 
• We have sorted holidays based on why they are celebrated- because of a natural event (like the Matariki constellation) or a holiday of historical or cultural significance (like ANAZC Day). 

Finally we sorted harvest events of the calendar of traditional Maori. We noticed that Spring and Summer were very busy times for harvesting foods. We learnt from Carolena about how different cultural groups traditionally preserved foods. The Romans salted meat to make it keep for longer. Many cultural groups dried foods, including traditional Maori, and we still dry and salt food today.
Mrs Walker taught us about poha and she had a dried gourd for the science table for us to touch, shake and inspect. The gourd, once dried, made an excellent container.  Carolena and William thought cutting the bottom off would make a great bowl.

We could see why Matariki was a good time for the new year to start on the Maori Calendar, because after all of the food gathered in Spring and Summer was preserved and stored for the Winter the colder months didn't require as much work.  Zara said it would have been the perfect time to feast, when food was plentiful and so much work had been done. Marley realised that because it was cold too, they would have wanted to stay inside and work on learning new things. Maita thought everyone would want to have fun and play games, then many children realised that children in particular would have probably spent time playing with titi torea.