On Friday we started a big project on Rube Golberg machines. An RB machine is a machine that is very complicated but it only does simple things like putting a piece of rubbish in the bin as we did on Friday, our RB Machine has a successful zip-line, a tunnel and down wood slope that a car goes down and hits the marble then goes through the tunnel and bumps into the carriage that nocks in the piece of paper into the bin. This project was really frustrating because we couldn’t find a carriage light enough because the zip line   was made from string and it was very flimsy.[ PS do not attempt this project if you don’t have passions.] We had 25 minutes to plan then we started to build, everyone was under pressure because we only had 2 hours to design, test, re-design, re-test and so on. I learnt a lot on Friday and cant wait to do this again next week.

Today was our first lesson on designing our official Rube Goldberg machine. Our plan is to turn a page in a book to do so we need a series of contraptions to turn the page or it won’t be a Rube Goldberg machine. Our plan is to make a marble go down an inclined plane off a ledge and into a pulley the wait of the marble will make the pulley fall down onto the see saw that falls down by the weight and hits a switch that turns on a fan and its job is turn a page in a book.

On Tuesday was our second session doing our designs for the Rube Goldberg machine. This session was mostly about fine lining the drawing and organising who is going to bring certain things in. the design looks a lot neater and tidy when you rube off all the grey led and just have the pen.

On Friday we started building our Rube Goldberg machine, it was really fun building all the different parts of the machine we started by building the pulley that works very well and only doesn’t work if we put too much of a heavy marble inside it. Our other contraption is the see-saw which is made out of Lego but it is a bit fragile and unstable so I built a stand for it. I think we had a pretty successful session.

On Tuesday we continued building the separate parts of our Rube Goldberg machine. Our main focus was to be able to start piecing them together by the end of the session, we also modified a few parts like the pulley and the see-saw, for example the pulley we made the bit that turns the string into a metal one and we made the see-saw lower and that’s about it but here is a some photos

today we were continuing building  and joining the separate parts together and we have finished the turning and fan part of it so all we have to do is the start and make it look cool and extend it and that’s what we were trying to do today but we didn’t succeed in doing so. it worked only in its separate parts but we take that as a win we got rid of the see-saw because it was just a waist of space and we did not need it. here’s a photo of what we have been doing.

Today we finished the building phase and now we are testing to see if it works but its only been a success 1s and we didn’t get it on video because it was only our first time we tested it which I was really annoyed about. Before we started our design session the teachers spoke to us about how this is our last we on our Rube Goldberg project so what we needed to complete this week is modifying our designs, having it working constantly we also need a video showing our journey that we have had during this project. When we were building today we notice that the starting marble rolls off the blocks so we built barriers and directors so that it would always go where we wanted it to, now the part was the two cut in half toilet rolls so what we did was we cut them in half and the we sticky taped one half onto the high table and then it drops onto the other and goes another way which then takes the marble to the pulley which then drops slowly onto the connects fan and turns a page in a book and YAY!!!! If that happens it works.

Today was all about modifying and testing and re testing. Today we were mostly focusing on making our machine more compact and more complicated by doing that we also made it a lot more portable, we also started getting footage for our Rube Goldberg video but mostly it was just getting it to work consistently and only not work some times. I have nearly finished my second design of the machine which consists of the simple machines, materials, the method and the sketch of what it would look like.

Today was our last session on our Rube Goldberg machines which is really sad. Throughout the unit I learnt that it takes a lot of passions and that the machine wont always work the first time and that sometimes it doesn’t even work at all. We made a video about our experience of the unit and we have been given time until Wednesday next but my group doesn’t need it because I finished the video today YAY. Guess what our RB machine works 9/10 times how good is that! My group and I tweaked the machine to make it more reliable. I am really disappointed this session Is over and I wonder what we will be doing in Term 3.

on Tuesday we had a Rube Goldberg expo and the year 4s came to have a look at our machines our parents also got the chance to come to and look to It was really exiting setting it up and showing lots of kids and the journey has been really fun and its really sad that its done.  ☹☹

In maths today we have been exploring Angles and discovering how to measure them. 5A and 5C worked together while playing games and having fun, I liked the way I learnt how to use a protractor and how to measure reflex angles using one.

This is a protractor its the easier way to measure angles. you line up the zero and then the other line shows you the degrees of the angle.

At school we have done many exciting things in term 1. The highlight for me was design, we had to make our own cereal box marble runs and our rollercoasters which took a lot longer because 1^st of all, they were 10 times bigger and secondly, we somehow had to connect to a different group and their rollercoaster. As for our marble runs they were a solo mission, the aim of the task was to make the marble go as slow as possible through the run. My favourite was the rollercoaster because it was more fun and exciting.

I also really enjoyed Drama. The production that we did for term 1 was The Lake, it was about under water pigs and how people used to go into the park and into the lake to swim but that all changed when the lake got infested by underwater pigs. The play is based on a poem where kids do all their river activities inside. They fed plastic ducks bread and sailed their toy boats and had races in the bath tub.

The Lake was really fun and different because we got to work among different people.

Apart from design writing is my favourite class subject, in writing this term we learnt how to a create sketch note. A sketch note is a way to express your thinking through drawings and pictures so you don’t have to write as many words. It can also be used as a writing seed and I thought that was pretty cool way to do a seed and it helped me be more creative.

In reading this term we have been reading 2 class novels called ‘Our Don Bradman’ and ‘Just A Dog’. The book ‘Our Don Bradman’ is a diary of a kid about my age called Victor McDonald. This book was written at the time of the great depression. Victor loves cricket almost as much as his friends and family. His 2 best friends were Ken and Jim, his 2 sisters Kate and Jesse. Victors family lived in Stockton then his dad lost his job so they had to move to Sydney so they could live with his aunty May, Uncle Jim and their grandmother. Victor got invited to a few different training camps for cricket and played for the school and saw Don Bradman regularly and even got invited to Don Bradman’s childhood home to meet his parents and I thought it was a really good book. Now moving onto ‘Just A Dog’, this story is about a boy named Corey and his dog Mr Moesly who is a big Dalmatian. Corey lives with his mum, dad and 2 sisters. He got Moe when he was little so he couldn’t talk properly. He meant to say the mostly white one instead he said the Moesly one and that’s how they came up with the name Mr Moesly. Together they have many adventures and stories to tell some good some bad. And I think this book is filled with emotion and I really enjoyed these 2 books that we read and I can’t wait for more in term 2.

Sport this term was a big highlight and lots of fun I did all kinds of sports in the summer, I did cricket/ kanga 8s it wasn’t what I thought it would be so I changed to Tennis witch I enjoyed the most out of the 2 sports. I was away on holidays for the summer sports carnival, which I was disappointed to miss out on. For the winter sports I chose footy but we have only had 1 training session on it which was focusing on skills like kicking handballing and stuff like that.

This term we had an incursion about making model wooden cars. 1^st we chose a model and then we got sawing. Then we attached the wheels, then the driver and got our license. My car turned out ok considering we were only doing it for an hour and a half, that was a lot of fun and I hope to do it again.

Term 1 has been a memorable term and its one of the best I’ve had so far and I can’t wait to see what term 2 holds in store for us.