Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Room 14`pest tracking and trapping

By Kohaya, Laura and Max

Wednesday , week 1 , term 4 2017

Anne and Ethan Zealandia rangers came in to room 14 to teach us
about tracking tunnels. Tracking tunnels are useful to tell if we have pests in Brooklyn School. Tracking tunnels are triangles made out of recycled real estate signs. They have an ink mat with peanut butter inside. If an animal wanders through and eats the peanut butter then you can see the footprints. We are using the tracking tunnels to figure out if there are any pests in Brooklyn School, where there are pests and what kind of pests they are. We made 5 tunnels and put them in different places around the school. In the orchard, the tree area, by the fence, under room 15 and 16 and under room 18 steps.








Tuesday, week 2, term 4 2017


Anne and Ethan came and visited us to see how our tracking tunnels were going. One of them was missing, three of them had tracks and the one in the orchard didn't. The one under room 18 had weta footprints. They were tiny little footprints like dots in a row. The one near the fence had big smudgy footprints and Anne suspects that it was a hedgehog. The one by the trees had weta footprints and another set of footprints that may be a mouse. We uploaded the photos to inaturalist app. This means that experts can look at our footprints and figure out what they are for us.





Now we know what pests we have we can start trapping them by setting up pest traps. Anne and Ethan came and gave us some pest traps and showed us how to set the pest traps safely.

Room 14 have been writing to Mrs Rhodes to convince her that we should set up a couple of pest traps. We want to do this because we dont want any other endemic birds, birds only found in new zealand, going extinct.

If you see any of our tracking tunnels or pest traps please don`t  touch or open them.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Busy start to the term!

It has been a busy start to the term. Today we had a dress up day where we came as a scientist. We had such an amazing range of scientists - astronomers, psychologists, entomologists, physicists, geologists, zoologists and many more. Hopefully, it opened a few minds as to the range of different types of science there is in our world.



We also had a visit from some scientists. Two rangers from Zealandia came to visit and help us with our project on pest tracking and trapping. We got some tracking tunnels made and placed around the school. I will leave the details to our student bloggers though!






As part of our science learning we got some flowers planted on Monday to help make a garden that attracts bees. We will be exploring more about germination and pollination over the next few weeks.


And we have started to think about statistics. To kick this off we are using data squares to gather information about our class. We have to ask questions, gather information, sort data and make statements about it. We will be doing lots of statistics as part of our science learning this term.