This week, Junior School students celebrated National Science Week. National Science Week is Australia’s annual celebration of science and technology.
The 2025 school theme, ‘Decoding the Universe – Exploring the unknown with nature’s hidden language’, focused on explaining the world around us by engaging with and observing the hidden and intricate patterns found all around us.
During our STEM lessons this week, Mr Roohan unpacked this theme with a range of activities. Here’s a little snapshot of what students explored:
Kindergarten: Sensory Stamps – Students explored the inner world of fruit and vegetables by using cut fruit and vegetables to stamp painted shapes.
Year 1: Nature Observations – After having some sequencing fun, making smiley-faced biscuits, students carefully observed the features of leaves, sketching details of lines and patterns.
Year 2: Decoding animal prints – When animals walk across the land, they leave behind prints. These traces can tell us where they have been and which way they are going. Students tracked some toy Australian animals through some cornflour before exploring the print shape and mapping their journey.
Stage 2: Plaster animal prints – Students observed the footprints made by Australian animals. Scientists can learn many things from footprints, and students created a plaster mould of their favourite Australian animal.
Stage 3: Fibonacci spirals – After learning that a number in the Fibonacci sequence (1,2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…. ) is determined by adding the previous two digits, students explored examples of Fibonacci numbers in nature. From flower petals and pinecones to the spirals on a snail or seashells, Fibonacci numbers are all around us.
