Year Six Pekapeka

 Today Year Six started a new mystery topic.  We learnt that when scientists classify animals it is called taxonomy. We began by sutdying the similarities between a mystery skeleton and a human skeleton.

Did you know that all animals can be seperated into two groups - vertebrates and invertebrates?

We could see a backbone so the mystery animals was a vertebrate.

We discovered the mystery skeleton was a bat.  We're going to study them because Peter and Zahara from Pestfree Howick said they live close by. We want to know how to protect this unique species.

"A species is a group of organisms that can reproduce and have off spring that can reproduce" Richie

What did we find out?

"Bats are the only mamals that can fly" Lose

"They use echo location to hunt" Aelene - we played a game to show how this works.

"Bats have similar bones to humans" Jason

Paris "All species have latin names."

What do we want to find out?

"Bats aren't blind.  They have good eye sight" Mila

Luca "When did people first discover them?"

"Has anyone eaten them?" Salar

"How long have they existed?"Mila

Maya "What is their life span?"

"Where they here before people?" Emma

"What do they eat?" Alysia

"Do they bite?" Lacey

"How do they mate?" Caleb

Year Three Investigate our Changing Mara

Today, Year Three talked about our changing garden now that takarua has turned to koanga. We wondered what happened to all the leaves that fell off the trees ...

“They blew away” Milan

“They went into the environment” Abby

Rhyden "The snow picked them up"

Zoey "I think that the wind blows them away and takes them to a forest"

Ibrahim "When it was autumn there was no sun just water and soil not the sun, so the leaves fell down and they die"

We took part in a Mystery Science lesson and created a paper model to investigate how the leaves seem to disappear over time.

What did we discover?

Colt "Fungus and worms and bacteria are super heroes"

"The animals broke up the leaves and the worms, bacteria and fungi ate them"

Next time we are going to learn about how scientists put animals into groups.