In Person Incursions are NOT available until 2022
Foundation - Year 2
Our Sessions:
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Engage children in increasingly complex sensory motor skills and movement patterns.
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Combine gross and fine motor movement.
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Encourage children to use their sensory capabilities and dispositions with increasing integration, skill and purpose to explore and respond to their world.
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Engage in activities that require spatial awareness and orientation.
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Engage children in the manipulation of equipment and management of tools with increasing competence and skill.
Topics
Forces
How do pushes and pulls make things move or change shape? What is a push or a pull? Can things move if we don’t touch them? Children will investigate how we use pushes and pulls 1000s of times a day to do almost every task; get dressed, walk, run, jump, colour, glue, throw or kick a ball, eat food etc. We will explore the relationship between how hard we push and pull something with how far the object moves. The children will make things move by rolling, cutting, stretching, squeezing, pushing, pulling and even splatting.
Forces
Weather
What is weather? What causes the changes in the weather? Where does wind come from? How is rain formed? Students will splat, drip, and spin to create a model of the interconnectedness of the elements of the weather. Then they will explore Earths precious resources, water, and the water cycle, through the creation of individual, working models. This is one of our favourite colourful, wet and surprising experimental sessions. We will put down a tarp to protect any carpeted areas.
Weather
Simple Machines
This session has objects flying around the room as we explore how a small amount of input (from us) can be converted to a much larger output with the help of simple machines. Simple machines help by doing some of the work for us. Every student will make exciting things happen using levers, screws, wheels and axels, wedges, inclines and pulleys. This session should ideally be run in a large space like a gym, multi-purpose room or relatively empty space.
Simple Machines
Properties of Materials
Students will explore different materials that make up objects in the world around us. These different materials have special properties that enable the objects to be used for the particular purpose of which they were designed. Students will explore the special properties of water and the properties of materials that are designed to soak up or repel water. This experiment, using test tubes and lots of bright colours produces surprising results that delight. Children will then explore some of the properties of metals by making metal sculptures that defy gravity. They will also explore properties of elastic materials and how we can use the energy stored in them.
Properties of Materials
Living Things
What are living things? What features do they have? Children will explore the different features of living things in three hands-on and super tactile experiments. This session gets awesomely messy but we assure you we will put down a tarp, supply lab coats and safety glasses and clean up. The children will be talking about it for weeks!
Living Things
Microbes
In this session we learn about how amazing our bodies are and how we can keep ourselves healthy. What are germs? We investigate the micro world of living things (germs) through three awesomely tactile and sensory experiments that get those fine and gross motor skills working. It is colourful, exciting and a little bit gooey.
Microbes
Shapes and How Things Move
How do things move? It’s all to do with their shape! Why are different things different shapes? How to circular things roll? Why do flat things stay still? This exciting session, full of moving objects, sees each of the children exploring the movement of a variety of different shaped objects through pushes, pulls, gravity and simple machines. It finishes with an experiment that uses our favourite 3D gas filled spheres (aka bubbles) and food colouring to cement the understanding of the difference between 2D and 3D shapes through the creation of a beautiful take home piece of art.
Shapes and How Things Move
Observing Changes
In this session, children will observe changes to objects in front of their eyes. They will create an artwork using plants and then INSTANTLY change the colours of their work by the addition of other special ‘chemicals’. It seems like magic. This experiment is very tactile and sees crushing and squashing of plant materials to extract a rainbow of colours. Children will then mix together two liquids and observe one change to a semi-solid in less than a minute. This is a super squishy and magical experiment that children LOVE.