Connected in 2006
Connected 1, 2006
'The Ice Hotel' explores the use of ice as a short-term, large-scale building material. Suggested follow-up activities in the teachers' notes guide students through an exploration of ice's properties and of techniques that can be used for shaping, colouring, and building with ice.
'The Sands of St Clair' looks at a structure designed to protect the beach from the sea. The notes suggest approaches for exploring the changes caused by erosion and ways of protecting land from surf by building structures.
The story 'Nailing It Down' offers another angle on building. Dad asks Jono to help him work out how many planks they'll need to build a fence. Hand-measuring them would be tedious, so Jono works out clever strategies for estimating what will be necessary.
'What's for Lunch?' is a fun story about devising a simple survey to find out whether girls are healthier eaters than boys. The story also explores how the class's wealth of data can be presented in graphic form.
The article 'How to Drink a Rose' details how a teacher introduced her class to making rosehip syrup, a traditional vitamin C supplement, and helped them to develop tasty recipes that include the syrup. The class had enormous fun with this food technology unit, which involved many successes and a few interesting failures.
Distribution
Copies of Connected 1 and the teachers' notes will be distributed in April to schools with primary classes. Intermediate schools received two reference copies of each.
Connected 1 2006 – item 31056; Teachers' Notes – item 31249.
Connected 2, 2006
In the story 'I Miss My Pet', the death of Tessa's guinea pig sparks a flurry of interest in the relative life expectancy of various pet species. Mrs Phylum guides the class through an investigation in which several statistical methods are applied to the question of which pet lives the longest. Tessa hopes to work out the most suitable replacement pet. She's not too happy to discover that it's a rat.
'Sniff, Swing, Swipe' describes how to make life interesting for zoo animals. The Sniff, Swing, Swipe programme was initiated at Auckland Zoo in 2001. The article focuses on the 2004 programme, which invited student ideas for enriching the lives of kea, spider monkeys, hawksbill turtles, and red pandas.
The article 'Patterns of Light' describes Kelson Tu'akoi's award-winning project for the 2004 Waikato Science Fair: photographing the interaction of water and light; selecting just the right shots to tell interesting scientific stories; and then writing captions to communicate the science behind the light patterns he photographed.
'What Is Light?' is a historical article about what happens when great minds don't quite think alike. From the 1700s onwards, eminent scientists energetically debated whether light is a form of pure energy or some kind of matter, until Einstein came up with the concept that most now agree on.
In 'The Big Race', Lola is fascinated by her grandfather's swimming medal, especially by how he won it. He started swimming only because he needed to exercise an injured knee, but the training and distances involved added up to success. Readers can engage with the number work behind both Grandpa's training schedule and the handicapping system that kept everyone swimming hard out in preparation for the Big Race.
Distribution
Copies of Connected 2 and the teachers' notes will be distributed in April to schools with primary classes. Intermediate schools received two reference copies of each.
Connected 2 2006 – item 31057. Teachers' Notes – item 31250.