There is evidence in our school bushland that a Southern Brown Bandicoot maybe using our school bushland as a habitat. Mrs Cogger invited some friends, who are wildlife and fauna enthusiasts, to come to St Emilie’s and investigate this further with her.
Mrs Cogger has made an imovie documenting the investigation. Please click on the link below to see what we discovered…..
During the last week of term one Mrs Cogger invited Rod Smith and the team from Birdlife WA to visit our Year 4 and 5 students and give a presentation about bird adaptations. The students had been learning about animal adaptations with the main focus being our unique Australian native animals. To help prepare the students for the visit, Mrs Cogger asked them to research the animal adaptations of their favourite Australian bird. This task was on the students Purposeful Practice Grid.
The incursion commenced with a presentation by Rod to highlight the unique adaptations of birds.
Rod shared his knowledge with the students about such facts as – bird habitats, plumage, camouflage, beak shape and size and feet shape and size.
Then the students were placed into smaller teams and taught how to use a binocular. There were enough binoculars for each child to have a set. These were provided by Birdlife WA.
Now the students were ready to go touring around the school grounds on a search for local birds.
To conclude the incursion Rod invited the students to share their findings and we recorded these on the whiteboard.
Mrs Cogger had set up her own bird display as Rod and the Birdlife WA team had visited St Emilie’s a few years ago. Mrs Cogger was interested to see if any new birds had been sighted.
In addition to the birds in the image above, we now have the following birds coming in and out of our school grounds
Mrs Cogger would like to thank Birdlife WA for once again coming to St Emilie’s to spend time teaching our students about WA birds. It was a most informative visit.
Throughout term one the Year 6 students have been working on a solar car project. Synergy and STAWA (Science Teacher’s Association of WA) provided solar car kits to schools who had registered for the project and challenge. The kit included enough materials for the students to build up to ten solar cars. At each lesson this term the students have conducted investigations with the solar cars such as
The project came to a climax today when 8 of our students competed in a race day at Willetton Primary School. We departed St Emilie’s at 8:45am in our maxi taxi and arrived at Willetton fully prepared to confront the challenge ahead of us. Mrs Cogger took 8 students – 4 competitors, 2 students with a model car and 2 spectators.
Immediately the coordinators ‘eyed off’ our model that had been carefully designed and constructed by Riley and Cohen and moved it onto the trophy table.
At 9:30am the competition commenced. The students had 60 minutes to build a solar car from scratch and test it out. There was a ‘hum’ of enthusiastic and engaged scientists at work in the hall at Willetton Primary School.
As luck would have it one of the schools that had registered did not show up, so the coordinators asked if our 4 spectators would like to enter. The team got off to a later start but they managed to have their vehicle build in time for the race. So now we had a St Emilie’s A and a St Emilie’s B team. Smiles all round as our spectators were now involved and also getting an opportunity to showcase their skills.
There were three race tracks set up in the hall so that the students could test out their cars.
The goal of the competition was to race the car along a 20m track made out of corflute board. Here are a few photos so that you can see the challenge that the students had to confront.
Unfortunately given today’s overcast conditions the students had to use battery packs as an alternative to the solar panel. Two students set their cars at the start line and at the finish line another pair of students had to ‘catch’ the cars so that they didn’t crash into the sand bags.
And the final result……
St Emilie’s Team A came fourth.
And Cohen and Riley won the best model prize
Mrs Cogger would like to add her own comments about the day. The students were a delight to take to the competition. They used their problem solving skills and faced all the challenges with a positive attitude. They were polite and extremely well -behaved. The students were happy to celebrate the success of the other competitors.
This is the first time that a solar car challenge event has been offered to primary and secondary students. The event was very well run and the coordinators were approachable, creating a positive atmosphere for learning and competing.
Mrs Cogger would also like to thank Mr Sayer our mentor through the Scientists in Schools program for giving up his time to work with the students and discuss such challenges as the angle of the panel, how to keep the car running straight and other obstacles and problems as they arose.
Recently our Year 6G students conducted a waste audit of all our recess and lunch waste from Years 1-6. Robyn Brown from Rivers Regional Council presented and conducted the waste audit with the students. At the time of the audit she indicated how impressed she was with the waste management at St Emilie’s in particular, our reduced use of ‘single use plastics’ such as Gladwrap.
Robyn Brown took our table of findings back to her office at Rivers Regional Council to analyse them and prepare a report. Just this week Mrs Cogger received an email from Robyn with her recommendations about how we can continue to effectively manage our waste. We will be addressing these improvements over the duration of the school year.
Here is Robyn’s reply
Your waste audit results reflect what we found on the day….a fairly large sum of food scraps compared to anything else.
The whole of annual school waste is quite low for 462 students at 1092kg. Some schools of your size would be throwing that out in paper alone!
Make sure you do congratulate everyone for following the principles you have been teaching, including parents!
I am happy to come again and chat with you or your Green Team about the next stages for accreditation or any other waste wise matter.
If you wish to see our waste audit results open the attachment below.
Today the Year 2 and 3 classes enjoyed a thoroughly informative visit from one of our regular visitors to St Emilie’s. Amy Krupa from SERCUL came to present a Frog Incursion. The students have been learning about life cycles with our main focus the life cycle of a frog. Amy came to tell us all about the 17 frog species that live in the Perth region. Two of the frogs – the Motorbike frog and the Slender Tree frog live most of their life cycle in trees. The remaining 15 Perth frogs live underground in burrows or on top of the ground.
The Year 2 students learned about the different frog species. Each team was given a frog sample in a jar and an information sheet. Their task was was to identify the size, colour, diet, noise and habitat of the specimen in their jar.
Amy invited each team of students to listen to a recording of the frog croaks. To conclude each team presented their findings to the class.
The Year 3 classes learned about the special breeding habits of the 17 different frog species. The students examined the different frog samples and read the information sheets and then recorded their findings on a worksheet.
Amy is a regular visitor to St Emilie’s and we enjoy learning about local wildlife from her and how to look after habitats and conserve our natural environment.
Last Friday, 3rd March, was Clean up Australia Day for schools. After registering on the Clean Up Australia website. Mrs Cogger received a kit including bags, gloves, information and promotional materials.
Students from Kindy to Year 6 were allocated an area, on the school grounds, to clean up. Everyone put on their gloves, or used the special robot arms, to pick up all the litter in their area.
After lunch, Mrs Cogger gathered the Year 6 Environmental Ministry Group for a photo before sending the litter all classes had collected to the skip bins.
In the afternoon 6G participated in a Waste Audit with Robyn Brown from Rivers Regional Council. A Waste Audit involves the students going through our recess and lunch waste and categorising it e.g., single wrap plastics, packaging, fruit scraps, containers etc. 
After the students had categorised the waste it then had to be weighed and the measurements recorded.
The results from our Waste Audit will be collated and a pie graph of our findings prepared for us by Robyn Brown.
This will inform our school community about the effectiveness of our current waste management strategies and how we can continue to make improvements.
Mrs Cogger would like to thank 6G and Miss Hynes for their mature and positive attitude throughout the Waste Audit. You will be hearing more from the Environmental committee about Waste management at St Emilie’s in the future.
Our Year Six students will be entering a team in the Synergy Schools Solar Challenge that will be held later this term. Entering this competition means we receive resources, including equipment and curriculum support material, to help deliver STEM learning based around solar energy.
Mrs Cogger picked up our kit on Monday from STAWA (Science Teacher’s Association of WA) and had a practise run at home before presenting the challenge to the 6B students today.
Here are a few photos of the students participating in the construction of their cars. Once the cars are constructed we will be conducting several investigations with the cars such as… ‘Which panel angle generates the most power?’ and ‘Which wheels give the car it’s greatest speed over 20m?’
We look forward to sharing more information about our Solar Car Challenge journey throughout the term.
I would like to wish all our students and their families a most Happy Christmas full of warm summer sunshine and good cheer. Take care and look after each other and I will see you again in 2017 for more exciting St Emilie’s Science.
I would also like to thank you all for your encouragement and support throughout the year.
And to all the parents who helped out with the Year 2 and 3 Veggie Garden Project – whether it be washing the gloves, weeding, planting, picking or selling – a big thank you. I hope you enjoyed the produce!
Happy holidays!!
Mrs Cogger
Our last lesson with Mr Sayer for 2016 was learning about volts, amps and ohms in an electric circuit. We started out our session with a class discussion on
To complete the tasks the students needed to learn many new words and their meanings. For example:
Then the students were placed in their teams to complete the challenges. The students took readings from the multimeter to measure the pressure in the battery and readings from the ammeter to measure the rate at which the current would flow. Here are a few images of the students conducting their circuit challenges.
Something new that we learned by conducting the challenges was OHMS law. The students were able to measure resistance using the data from the ammeter and multimeter readings.
We thank Mr Sayer for his continued mentoring in Science at St Emilie’s and we wish both Mr Sayer ands wife Suzanne a very Happy Christmas.
The Year 6 Science inquiry students met with Mr Sayer this week for a most interesting task – dissembling an engine. Firstly Mr Sayer explained the difference between a 2 stroke and a 4 stroke engine. For todays activity we were just going to focus on the 2 stroke engine.
We started out with a brainstorm about ‘combustion’ which means the burning of any fuel. The students understood that for combustion to occur there must be three elements –
Then Mr Sayer slowly pulled apart the engine of a weed trimmer taking care to explain each component and it’s role in the engine system.
Here are a few photos with supporting facts to show what we learned about 2 stroke engines.
SPARK PLUG: Ignites fuel air mixture above the piston to cause the fuel to burn (combustion)
CRANKSHAFT: Converts up/down motion of piston to rotary motion.
MAGNETO: Electric generator to create spark at correct moment in the cycle.
PISTON & CONNECTING ROD: Gas at high pressure forces piston down.
FUEL TANK: holds petrol and oil mixture.
AIR FILTER: prevents dirt and dust entering engine and causing wear.
CARBURETTOR: mixes fuel into air in correct proportions and controls amount of fuel entering engine to control power output.
CORD PULL STARTER: provides initial rotation to start engine.
We thank Mr Sayer for providing such an interesting activity with an accompanying powerpoint to help explain all the important facts.
