Posts By Kerrie Cogger
Checking up on our potatoes in Year One
The Year One students planted their potatoes on Friday 24th May. Every week they visited the garden beds along with Mrs Cogger and Mrs Roberto to see how many potatoes had come up.
Every week more and more potatoes popped up! This week we counted 39 potatoes. Here are a few photos of our students examining their potato seedlings.
Thanks to Seed Potatoes for Schools WA for supporting us with this project. We are all thoroughly enjoying it.
Snap on Kits with Curtin STEM Outreach
This week our 6G students enjoyed an incursion with Brad and Aleesha from Curtin University.
The Curtin STEM Outreach program is committed to providing opportunities for future scientists and engineers, as well as their educators – encouraging them to learn new skills, meet like-minded people and spark excitement for science and engineering.
Aleesha and Brad presented an activity that incorporated simple circuits using electric snap on kits. They commenced the presentation by demonstrating the flow of electrons and how static electricity works.
The children were required to meet a challenge by imagining they were stranded in the in an underground cave : How would they alert rescuers? How would they keep cool in the heat? And what would they use for light in the pitch black of night?
Using the Snap on Kits, the students were able to successfully create all three devices and complete the challenge.
We thank Brad and Aleesha from Curtin STEM Outreach for an informative and exciting incursion
Vote for St Emilie’s
St Emilie’s is a Waterwise School. Throughout the year Mrs Cogger submits activities to the Waterwise Schools ‘Ripple Effect’ blog. Ripple Effect is about sharing our water education activities, exploring what other schools are doing and voting for our favourites!
Here is a submission that Mrs Cogger entered in Term 4 last year. Waterwise Schools is inundated with blog posts from schools all around WA. Finally St Emilie’s 2018 Year 6 graduating class has been recognised for their work on aquatic weeds.
Click on this link to read the post and then VOTE for us!
Learning about our catchment with Jason Pitman
This week the Year 3 students enjoyed an incursion with Jason Pitman (environmental scientist) from Perth NRM (Natural Resource Management).
The students learned about the Swan and Canning River catchment and how our actions at school and at home can affect the river ecosystem.
The Year 3 students learned about some of the species living in the river and how we can reduce some of our impacts on their habitat.
We thank Jason for coming to St Emilie’s and sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm about the Swam/Canning River catchment with us. We all learnt a lot and it was a wonderful opportunity to connect our knowledge with a real life purpose.
Learning about our Earth’s resources
Recently the Year 4, 5 & 6 students have been learning about Earth & Space Science. As part of these studies, we had a visit from Earth Science Western Australia (ESWA) on the 16th of May. The Year 5 students took part in some hands-on activities and learned about how farmers can use chemistry to test rocks to help them improve their soil.
The Year 6 students learned about the different types of volcanoes and completed an investigation about the viscosity of their lava. Thanks to WASP, an initiative supported by Woodside and ESWA, for an exciting incursion.
The spuds are in!
This week our Year One students planted their seed potatoes. This is a partnership with WA potatoes. Students all across the state are growing their own potatoes through the Seed for Schools program.
St Emilie’s received a kit with plenty of seed potatoes, educational resources for teachers to use in classrooms, and there is a monthly e-newsletter with gardening tips and stories of progress from participating schools.
This is a highly successful initiative and St Emilie’s is proud to be involved. It was great to see our students getting their hands dirty and having some fun while planting, nurturing and learning about potatoes.
Mrs Cogger would like to thank Mr Cogger for preparing the garden beds and our parent helpers for supervised the planting of our four garden beds.
We also appeared in the WA Potatoes blog. Here is a peek….
Science Newsletter Term Two
Saving St Emilie’s Bushland
Our school bushland is enjoyed by our students and of great aesthetic value to our school environment. Mrs Cogger enjoys taking the students to the ‘bush classroom’ each term for various activities.
Unfortunately many years ago we found out that the trees had ‘dieback disease’. Since then we have embarked on an injection program every few years. In 2013 the Dieback Working Group came to the school and supervised the students with the injection program and provided all the materials and phosphate. Here is a photo of Alyssa and Bayley from Year 6 2013.
The next time the the trees were due to be treated was in 2016 and we had the help of Conservation Volunteers WA. Here is a photo of the team.
The trees in our bushland are due to be treated again. This is high priority if we have any chance of saving the most vulnerable species like the Banksias. As well as other species like Sheoak, Macrozamia, grass trees etc. Our bushland is also home to a family of Southern Boobook Owls, a Southern Brown Bandicoot, a Bobtail Goanna and other native species.
We have a BUSY BEE planned for Saturday 4th May commencing at 8am. Mrs Cogger would like to invite you to help ‘save our bushland’ by assisting with the injection program on Saturday morning. Chris (father of Kadyn Year 6 and Kiara Year 3) has kindly offered to hire the gear from Murdoch University and instruct us on how to inject the trees with phosphate. All we need now is a team of committed parents to assist us on the day. BYO drill, rubber gloves and goggles if you have any.
If you have would like to volunteer your time please register via this link
Link to Busy Bee registrations
If yo ave any questions about the dieback injector program please contact Mrs Cogger or Mr Munro.
Once our trees have been treated we will be able to commence our replanting program with the grant funds recently received from Woolworths Junior Landcare.
In anticipation of a productive BUSY BEE…
Synergy Schools Solar Car Challenge
Our reported Ava Thorpe shares her experience of the day.
Hello staff, parents and students. St Emilie’s have been to the grand final of the Synergy Schools Solar Car Challenge at Optus stadium on the 9th of April 2019. We went in a maxi taxi at 9:00am. We were all feeling very excited and nervous about the day ahead.
We arrived there at 9:30am and after we got signed in, we found our table and had a look at our equipment. At this point we were quite excited but nervous. We hoped our car would be good on the day.
We went through our box to make sure we had everything. At 9:45am we got prepared for the building process. We went outside and had a look at the track to see what it was like.
By 10:17am and we were ready to start the building process scheduled for 10:30am and at this stage we were so super nervous about today’s challenge. We started off well and first we took out our supplies. First Sophia E and Jacob put the guide pins in. Sophia C, Sophia E and Jacob put the axel and the wheels into the chassis.
Jack attached the wires to the motor and switch. Jack also attached the alligator clips to the wires so it could connect. Everyone helped to put the gears into the wheels. We placed the spacers into the axels to make the wheels run more smoothly. Then we attached the cable ties to the switch to hold the switch in place. We exchanged the small wheels for all big wheels.
We kept the solar panel in the shade. We decided to elevate the solar panel a little bit so we could get more sun. Attaching the solar panel was a bit harder than it looked. Jack and Jacob also attached the battery pack in case it was too cloudy for the solar panel. It was a hot day but thankfully was also a sunny day. Placing the wires on the alligator clips was very hard to do.
Once completed we went outside to test drive it. Our car wasn’t going fast enough. Our average time for 20 metres was 8 seconds. We were confused with what was going on with our car. We spent the time trying to figure out what was wrong with our car by giving it a few more test drives. We got the time down to 7 seconds. Our car improved.
7 news were there recording our challenge. We thought we could work out what was wrong with our car. We placed the solar panel in the exact same spot as before and put the small wheels back on. We put double sided tape on the wheels to make it sort of stick. It did the trick last time, so we have high hopes for this time.
By 11:16am we were happy with our car and have we have come up with a name for our car. We named it ‘Weapon’. We polished up our car to make it the best we could. We did one more try for good measure. Our car was really slow. There were only 19 minutes left until the races start. There was so much going on!
At 11:30am we went to get some morning tea and we had a chocolate muffin. There are 5 minutes left of the building process. At 11:40am we went outside to start racing and we were really excited. We were in round 3 and we were versing Huntingdale PS and Amaroo PS. On both races we came second and on the third race we came third. Thankfully we were into the next round. We fixed our car and it was performing better.
On the next round we were versing Amaroo and Bunbury. On the first race it was a false start on the second race we came third. On the third race we had another false start. We did not go on to the next challenge. The best place we could achieve was either fifth or sixth. We did one more race and we came 6th place.
After the award ceremony a drone flew over us and took photos and videos. The school that won was Amaroo PS but overall we had an amazing time and everyone who participated should be very proud. Even though we didn’t win, we were the first year sixes to get in the grand final from St Emilie’s CPS. Thank you for reading and thank you Optus stadium, Synergy and STAWA for having us. We really appreciated it. Also thank you Mrs Andrews and Mrs Cogger for coming on this amazing journey with us. Thank you parents and everyone who came to support us.
Goodbye and thank you so much for having a chance to read this amazing journey and opportunity for us.
Thank you and have a great day!
By Ava Thorpe
Here is a video recorded and put together by Jayden Victor.
