Personal Space

 One of our Quest sessions recently was spent looking at personal space. How much space does one person need and how much space are we comfortable with? We discovered that some people don't mind others getting quite close to them, while some prefer a lot of space.

We also looked at how people mark their space - with personal effects, barriers such as walls / fences. Countries often show ownership of their space by flying a flag, and people show their affiliation with a country by displaying a flag at competitions like the Olympics or World Cup sports events. 

Some students designed their own flags, and some completed quizzes on flags. We have a few flag experts in our groups who taught me a thing or two - great to see them sharing their knowledge with others! 

Here is a flag puzzle you might like to try at home...

Next we looked at the world population and how space is more limited in some countries than others. We looked at design ideas for small spaces. Some students chose to design 'tiny homes', a dream room, or a space for nature. Creative design can help us to come up with solutions for problems and it was great to see the many varied ideas that children had. 

This population growth animation was popular and contains a lot of information about how the world's population has changed over the years since 1AD. 

This learning helps children to see that everyone experiences life differently - some enjoy being around others a lot, some need more space. It also allowed them to look at how we can design solutions to help us feel more comfortable with the space we have. 

SPACE

 This term we are looking at the concept of space. As many children in Quest are keen on outer space we have started by looking at that, so they can share their knowledge and build on their interests.

WHAT'S OUT THERE? We looked at the solar system and our place in space, measuring out the distance each planet is from the sun and from each other with toilet paper! Kids first had to try to name the planets and then put them in order. We learnt a mnemonic to help us remember the order. Some made up their own mnemonics. We discussed other ways to remember facts, and talked about other uses for mnemonics (eg to help us remember things we might need to know in college / uni). This website on the scale of the universe was a popular one for exploring our place in space. 

SPACE EXPLORATION - TELESCOPES. We looked how people have discovered things about space - using curiosity and careful observation. We thought about how stars have been used for hundreds of years to help people navigate. We looked at the story of Galileo Galilei - how he first used a telescope to look up and how he questioned the popular thinking of the day that the universe was earth centric (it was thought that everything orbits the earth). Galileo agreed with another theory of the time - that the earth orbited the sun. This was against the beliefs of the church at the time and resulted in Galileo being put under house arrest for the rest of his life. We talked about the fact that science understandings have changed over the years, as technology advances and as people learn more, and sometimes people who propose new ideas might be less than popular. Next we looked at Hubble Space telescope and the fact that after years of planning and creating, when launched in 1990 the $1.5 billion telescope had a problem with one of the
mirrors that caused blurry photos. We used this story to discuss what to do if we come up against a problem - how do people deal with problems? So we saw that when discovering new things it takes curiosity, observation, creativity, determination. Sometimes we can come across people who disagree with our ideas, or problems that seem difficult to fix. But that is all part of the journey of learning. 

SPACE EXPLORATION - PEOPLE IN SPACE. If you went to space what would be good? What would you miss? What would be difficult? We thought about what it would be like living on the ISS (International Space Station). We thought about what would be different to living and working on earth. We are taking part in an International Space Chilli Project - growing chilli seeds we have been sent from Mexico from a NASA scientist alongside many others around the world. Some students came up with ideas for how to grow these plants if we were in space and we are going to try some of those ideas and see how they grow. The idea is to track their growth (they are to be grown inside) and see if there is a difference between ones growing in space and ones grown on earth. 

SPACE EXPLORATION - TERRAFORMING. Terraforming is making something uninhabitable into something suitable for human life. If humans are to live on Mars one day there are lots of issues that need thinking through and planning for. We talked about what people NEED to live, and what are nice extras but not needed. We had a debate about whether computers are a need or a want for people. We had to be creative with ideas for how humans might eventually live on another planet, and how we could not only make it liveable, but also enjoyable - to look after people's physical and mental health.

Antarctic Adventurer

 Kevin Biggar walked to the South Pole in 2006 / 2007, and he and team mate Jamie Fitzgerald became the first New Zealanders to walk unaided to the pole. We were lucky enough to have Kevin speak to us at Quest today via zoom. He told the kids about his inspiration from hearing stories about Robert Falcon Scott when at school. Kevin spent a lot of time planning and training to prepare for his Antarctic trek. 

He had a 160kg sled full of gear to pull in Antarctica. We tried pulling each other on tarpaulins on the field and found it difficult to pull approx 30kg, and impossible to pull more!

Kevin showed us some of the gear he took to keep warm, to keep on track, and to cook food. We heard about how long it took and how hard it was. It takes a lot of courage and determination to walk in such extreme conditions. It took more than 50 days and they walked over 1000km!! Wow - what an adventure!

Kevin has also set a record for rowing across the Atlantic Ocean (with Jamie), and they both presented on TVNZ's First Crossings and Intrepid New Zealand. Here is a link to Kevin's website if you want to find out more about him. 

Thank you to Max's Mum Lisa for connecting us and helping set this up. And thanks to Kevin for sharing his amazing story!

TERM 3 - Shaping our future

This term groups are looking at how they can have a say and make a difference in their future.

The year 5&6 groups are looking at the election - learning about what political parties are, how people vote and how a government is formed in NZ. We are going to have a Quest election. Kids get to form parties (or be independents) and campaign about what they would do if they got to run Quest for a session. We will be voting on this in week 8, and whoever wins will get to run Quest for their session in week 9.

Those who don't want to campaign or join a 'party' can help me with organising and running the election. Those who are campaigning need to come up with a party name, logo, slogan, policies, advertising etc.

We will be having speeches and debates and looking at how things are done at election time by political parties to get ideas on how to run our campaigns. I have signed up for 'Kids Voting – Te Pōti a Ngā Tamariki' and we will be sent a  ballot box and other resources to make it more realistic.

Children will have to think about whether they can follow through on their election promises, and voters will need to evaluate whether they believe each campaign - should be fun!

The year 3&4 groups are off to Antarctica! Last week we experienced a little of what it feels like in the extreme cold there - we looked up the weather and it was -54C!! We thought about how people and animals would keep warm and did some experiments with buckets of ice water and our hands... 

In the coming weeks we'll be looking at how climate change is affecting Antarctica, what causes it, people who are trying to make a difference, and what we can do to help if we want to.

Biomimicry -learning from nature

"Nature does it best."  Some designers look to nature for solutions to problems and for new design ideas. We looked at how velcro was invented after the Swiss engineer George de Mestral got burs stuck to his trousers and dog's fur. He was curious as to how it worked and spent the next few years developing his ideas and finally creating velcro.  We studied some 'biddy-bids' with magnifying glasses to see what we noticed.

We came up with ideas of animals that could have traits that could help us develop inventions to help people in many areas. 

We looked at many examples of designs that have used ideas from nature. There are some great resources out there - one of them a book written by Dee Pigneguy, who happens to be the Grandma of one of our students! Check out this peek inside 'Nature's Techno Tricks' for lots of amazing biomimicry information.  

If we look closely enough at nature imagine how many ideas we could get for designs in the future!

Other points of view

This week we looked at other points of view.

The seniors looked at a day in 1769 (4th November), when the Endeavour sailed into Te Whanganui-o-Hei (Hei's great bay), near Whitianga. Unfortunately a maori man was killed on that day. Students read stories and accounts of many people who were in the area that day - the local maori people who went to trade with the ship, and those who were on board the ship or ashore exploring. We tried to figure out why the man was shot and what each person at the time would have thought about it. We discussed misunderstanding and differing points of view. 

The year 1-4 students looked at similarities and differences in people and accepting ourselves and others. We read the story of the sneetches by Dr Seuss. We discussed ideas for how the sneetches without stars could deal with the situation. Then we looked at this story compared to how some people with differences might act these days - how we treat those who are a different age, size, gender, race, colour etc to us. There were some great discussions about inclusiveness. We looked at how far NZ has come (looking at the 'korero pakeha' movement when speaking maori was suppressed in schools - some as recently as 1980!) We still have a way to go, but maori language is growing again and more people understand and speak a bit. 

Progress and learning

How do we make progress? Over the last few weeks we have looked at qualities and traits that help us make progress. 

WORLD RECORDS

We tried our own 'class records' and noticed that with practice we improved, and those who persevered often did well. We noticed that we all had different strengths / skills too. If we had a goal - something to beat - we often persevered more and rose to the challenge. Some people had more perseverance than others. 

LEARNING FROM MISTAKES

We looked at the Titanic and how noticing the mistakes on that voyage helped improve safety for boats since then. Even though some mistakes are very tragic we can still learn from them to ensure progress is made so that tragedies like that do not happen again. The year 1-4 groups acted out the story to try to get an understanding of it. 

COMMUNICATION

Curiosity, invention and competition all combine to help make progress with communication over the years. The kids were amazed to hear that most of their parents are older than Google and older than the internet! They had fun looking at old phones I brought in, and explored different communication methods.