Second week at Enrich

Today at Enrich Darryn told us what the concept curriculum is for the year. Concept curriculum is one of the four corner stones. This year it is patterns. We had a big discussion about where we can find patterns and they're surprisingly in a lot of different places. Some of the things that I wrote down were Tessellation's, illusions and that a pattern is something that repeats. It's quite hard to think of what a pattern is.

Egg Experiment

Today I went to a workshop with Alana. It was on gravity and inertia. Gravity is a force that pulls objects closer to the centre of the Earth. Inertia is something that continues in it's existing state of rest.

We had a cup of water about 3 quarters full, a big piece of plastic, a little tube and an egg. We put the tube in the middle of the plastic and put the egg sideways on the tube and that all went on the cup. My hypothesis was that the plastic and tube will move but the egg won't and it will fall into the cup. I tried it and I was right. We had to do that lots of different times to make sure that that's what was meant to happen.

Wilson Game

This morning at Enrich we played a Wilson game called hula hoop amoeba. In this you have to try and jump into a hoop. We were in groups of three. I was with Nathan and Kavarn. When Darryn said jump and clapped at the same time, we had to jump. The teacher's job is to get us out. Once we had got into the first hoop we had to jump out of that one and carry on to the next one. The team that I was in came first and we almost got in again.

Plant Biology

                                                                   Anther

Petal with Pollen

                                                                          Ovule
Today at Enrich some of us did Plant biology. We were cutting up a flower and looked at it through the Dino scope. We cut open the ovary and dino scoped the ovule. The bees land on the Anther and the pollen sticks to them. Then when they fly to another plant and  the pollen comes off on the other plant and then it travels down the stigma and fertilizes the ovules and they grow seeds.  When the plant dies it dries up and the seeds fall out, and then new plants grow! We looked at the textures of the petals and it looked like heaps of little circles. It was really interesting seeing the other things inside the plants.

Sea Shepherd

Today at Enrich Grant who was a Sea Shepherd came in to talk to us about whale hunting. He showed us a video about whale hunting. The Japanese said that they are taking whales for scientific research, but if they were, they wouldn't be killing thousands of whales a year. The Sea Shepherd crew didn't eat any meat or some dairy products because they're telling other people to stop eating meat from whales and they thought it might be a bit of a hypocrisy. The Sea Shepherds throw stink bombs at the whaling ships because it taints the meat which you can then only use for research. There were lots of questions asked and there we a couple of them that Grant couldn't answer. It was very interesting listening to .Grant because I wasn't very aware of how many whales were being killed                     

Waihopai River Planting

This morning at Enrich we went to plant about 300 trees and plants at the Waihopai River to stop mud from going into the river and when the river floods the mud will stick to the plants. We were there for about 2 hours. When we planted them we put it in the ground, put down the felt, put in four bamboo sticks and a cover. While we were planting, Darryn's dog Bruce was running round watching us and making sure we were doing it properly. After we had been planting for a long time we all got some juice. Then we went back to working for about an hour. Then Kate, Hannah H, Hannah M and Madison thanked us for helping them with what they organized. After that we walked up the hill back to the bus and came back to Enrich.

Charcoal drawings

Today at Enrich some of us did some drawing with charcoal. It's very messy but it comes off pretty easily. We practiced on a normal piece of A3 paper and our mountains looked like cartoon mountains. But we watched a video and it helped us a lot with what our mountains looked like. It took a long time but this is what it turned out like.