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Polar Bears
This week we have been learning about polar bears in the Centaurus Learning Space. This has involved conversations about the habitat of polar bears and what features they have that help them live in the cold, icy arctic. Did you know that polar bears are considered marine mammals because they spend so much time in the water?
Our classroom was full of activities to explore these incredible creatures. Using our maths skills, we compared our hands to a polar bear paw. Polar bear paws are "big, gigantic, massive, huge, and ginormous" compared to ours. This is some of the language we used to explain the differences we noticed. For those who were interested, we expanded this to involve measuring with rulers too. This is linked to the communication strand of Te Whāriki – recognising mathematical concepts and using them with enjoyment, meaning and purpose.
We discovered that polar bears' paws are bumpy so they can grip the ice. This was a theory we needed to test. We made some icebergs and floated them in a sea with a gritty sandy bottom. First, we slid our polar bears across the ice – they skated! Next, we tried to help them grip some of the sand and tried the rocks to see if their roughness helped to stop the slipping. It did a bit. Then used some sandpaper. We put the sandpaper grit side down onto the ice and put our polar bears on top and tried to make them skate and slide. But they couldn’t. The sandpaper gave them the friction they needed to grip the ice. This activity links to Te Whāriki and the exploration strand as children generated and refined their working theories of how the world works and used a range of strategies for problem-solving. As always in our classroom, we like to provide lots of opportunities to practice relationship skills, such as turn-taking and sharing. Children practiced these as they worked alongside each other with the two polar bears. This linked to this was the contribution strand where children used a range of strategies to play and learn alongside each other.