Category: Year 3 Blue
Waterwise Schools visit St Emilie’s
This week the students had a visit from Megan Brown from Waterwise Schools. Megan gave presentations to the students on a variety of Waterwise topics.
Megan explained about the important work of the Water Corporation and it’s role to provide clean and healthy water to Western Australians.
Megan showed us water ‘before’ it goes to the treatment plant.
And we compared the water to ‘cleaned’ water.
Megan told us how the dams used to provide Perth with enough drinking water but because of our drying climate we now have to source other water resources.
We learned how there is limestone in the ground around Perth. Limestone ‘holds’ water.
Megan showed us this fantastic model of the water cycle and we could see how the water soaks into the ground below.
We learned about the desalination process.
To conclude we learned that our drinking water comes from three sources – dam, ground and desalination.
The Year 5 students had an interesting presentation about how Aboriginal people valued and sourced water and the strategies that they used to locate sources.
The Year 6 students completed a quiz using Keepads.
We learned about the desalination process – how the water is processed using
- ultra filtration
- reverse osmosis and
- ultra violet light
This is the unit used in the reverse osmosis process.
The water goes through four stages before it is pumped into our water supply.
The Year 3 students participated in a drama activity about the water cycle.
The focus in the Year 4 session was to learn how leaves use and transport water. The students had the opportunity to use their Rotary microscopes.
We thank Megan from Waterwise Schools for sharing her Waterwise knowledge with us. The presentations were most informative.
Year Three Parent Letter – Term Four
Welcome to Term Four! We hope you had a wonderful break! Below you will find some information about what your child will be learning this term.
Around the World
Welcome to St. Emilie’s International Airport! Please make your way to Gate 4 for boarding!
This term, we were lucky enough to perform our ‘Around the World’ themed assembly item to our school community. Prior to this performance, we researched a selection of different countries within our world. These countries included: The United States of America, India, Greece, China and of course, our very own, Australia. We discovered that in each of these different countries, the people gathered together for different celebrations including: Thanksgiving, Dewali, Name Day, Chinese New Year and Australia Day.
We worked together to find interesting facts about each celebration, to then use as part of our script for the assembly.
We also had the opportunity to look closely at the flags of our chosen country. We researched the significance of colours, lines and shapes.
Some of the countries dance together during the celebrations. We had fun trying out some of the international dances.
Isabel was kind enough to lend us her traditional Chinese dragon puppet for the assembly. We thought it looked great, and also holds great significance within the Chinese New Year festivities.
We couldn’t forget our very own ‘land down under’ to return home to, after our big trip! Australia has many great stories, as well as celebrations, that we are proud to be involved in. We all had an opportunity to share what our families like to do on special celebration days, which included a lot of barbecues and swimming in the pool!
We hope you had as much fun as we did, travelling around our wonderful world!
Year Three Purposeful Practice – Weeks Seven and Eight
A cold morning in the veggie garden
This morning the Devereux brothers and and the Backus children met with Mrs Cogger to work in St Emilie’s Community Veggie Garden. Today we had some seed potatoes to plant. These were left over from our donation of seed potatoes from WA Potatoes Seed Potatoes for Schools project. We had been waiting for these last few potatoes to start ‘chitting’. Mrs Devereux also brought along a few of her Royal Blue potatoes that were ready to be planted.
First of all we had to weed the garden bed.
Here we are ‘armed and ready’ with our garden tools.
Then we had to dig a hole to plant our potato.
It was so cold this morning that we were all breathing out ‘steam’. So Mrs Cogger took a photo of us all being little ‘puffing billies’. Can you see the steam?
We are still looking to fill the veggie garden roster with volunteers so if you would like to meet on Friday 17th August at 8am, then please let Mrs Cogger know. Mrs Cogger would like to thank the Devereux and Backus families for volunteering this morning.
Year Three Purposeful Practice – Weeks Four & Five
National Schools Tree Planting Day
On Friday it was National Schools Tree Planting Day. The Year 3 students planted a ‘Noonjar Bush Tucker Garden’ with tube stock plants kindly donated by SERCUL, one of the local environmental groups that we are in partnership with.
Groups of students worked with Kirsten Devereux and Mrs Cogger to plant out the bush tucker garden. If you would like to take a look, you will find the bush tucker garden along the fence line behind the Year 1 boat playground.
The Year 3 students have been learning about bush tucker plants during their Science lessons this past fortnight so they were very well informed about the different species and the Noonjar uses for them.
Some of the species that were planted are
The Scarlett Runner – Noonjar people use this for making crafts and tools as the stem can be used like a ‘twine’ and the leaves can be brewed to make tea.
This is known as a Bloodroot and can be roasted and eaten like a potato.
The students also planted the Bull Banksia which is used to carry a flame when moving camp sites.
Here are some images of the students working hard on Friday morning. As you can see there was a lot of work to be done.
Of course by 10:30am we were not finished. There were still 12 plants left to go in. So at 2pm Mrs Cogger invited the Year 6 Environmental Committee to help her finish off the project. Thanks Year 6.
Mrs Cogger would like to thank Kirsten Devereux for kindly helping out as it was a huge task to get all of these plants in and she did a fantastic job – helping set up all of the equipment and marking out a planting pattern.
We would also like to thank Natasha Bowden from SERCUL for supporting us with this project and for donating the plants.
