Monday, October 24, 2016

Visit from a Quality Engineer

We had a mum in our class today who is both an engineer and a scientist.
Norahella works as a Quality Engineer in Medtronic.
She helped us understand what it really means to be a scientist.
The most important words for scientists are WHY?  HOW? and WHAT?
Norahella helped us to work scientifically...
How? ......  with M & Ms!
First of all we had to ask some scientific questions about the bag of M & Ms.
We wondered how many M & Ms are in a bag and whether each bag contains the same number of each colour?
Next we had to form a hypothesis (a guess).
We had to guess how many M & Ms are in a bag?
Some of us had a guess, then we were told the correct answer.
Next we had to guess which colour had the most number M & Ms and which colour had the least number.
Again we heard the correct answer.
Lastly we were given some very interesting (and delicious) homework:
We were each given a mini bag of M & Ms and we have to count how many of each colour there are, and how many M & Ms there are altogether.
Norahella will collect all this data and present it back to us scientifically.
We can't wait.
Of course, now we ALL want to have a job that uses Science and Maths every day!
Norahella came back to us with the results of the M  & M challenge....most reds, least greens, 422 sweets consumed!  Lots of scientific questions!
We also watched the way the colours ran from the sweets.
The colours were absorbed by the water at different rates.

Friday, October 14, 2016

Visit from a medical devices engineer

We have a dad in our class who is an engineer in a medical devices company.
Vladimir gave us a wonderful presentation about being and engineer.
He told us how engineers have great ideas, how they design and make new products.
We were very impressed at how his job can help so many people.
Vladimir answered all our questions.
Thank you so much for a wonderful presentation today.

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Hi Glo Road Safety posters

We made great posters with glo in the dark paints and skeletons.
Our message is
Wear bright clothes to be safe on the roads!

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Visit from a food microbiologist

We have a mum in this class who is a food microbiologist.
Ana came to our class today to give a wonderful presentation on food safety and bugs.
She took swabs of 3 children's hands (one washed his hands with soap, one washed her hands with water and one didn't wash his hands at all).
Ana will have these swabs tested (and one from an apple which had rolled on the floor, had been in a lunchbox, on the table and in various hands before being swabbed) and will have the results for us on Friday.
We can't wait!
Ana also talked about food with sell by dates and what that means for food safety.
We have left two yoghurts on the window sill.  We expect that the heat there will cause the yoghurts to go off and maybe explode!
How exciting!
Thank you Ana for such a wonderful talk!
Friday, October 15th.
Ana came back to us with the results of the swabs.
See for yourself:
We are going to be very careful about washing our hands in future!

Here is a fun site about handwashing and germs:

Monday, October 10, 2016

Occupations: Visitor from Thermo King

We had a visitor from Thermo King today.
His name is Derek and he is the dad of one of the boys in our class.
Derek told us all about refrigeration and heating units that are on trucks to keep produce warm or cold.

Derek showed us pictures of the refrigerated trucks down through the decades which was really interesting, and we saw the gadget that allows stocktaking.
It was such an interesting talk, thank you so much Derek.