View from the Kleinlehrer Family Science Building

Jennifer Selinger

“Bones, bones, bones, bones, the giant sea-dog moans,” says James Reeves and Year 10 would be forgiven for moaning similarly, as they have been looking at quite a lot of bones over the last few weeks. They took a field trip to the Australian Museum to do research into evolution, using the collection to deepen their understanding of Natural Selection and the Theory of Evolution by actually looking at real examples and life-sized models of the evidence. On the subject of bones, the Science department has recently been the grateful recipients of a box of real bones that will make our teaching that much more authentic and interesting for the students. Thank you to the anonymous donor – we were very excited to get the romantic-looking box and open it (with an appropriate creak) to see our gift!

Year 8 students have been visiting Mars, at least in their imaginations, and have been delving into such questions as how long a month should be (Mars has two moons and one circles in seven hours and the other takes a few days). Is a second a second and a minute a minute or do we make Mars Minutes? Is 24 hours a good length for a day? How are we going to work out school holidays? How about the Jewish Festivals – will Yom Yippur be even longer? They have also been considering the difficulty of representing the size of the planets in our Solar System and the distances between them on the same scale – a walk to Randwick is in their near future as we try to help them to visualise the distances involved. One interesting fact that emerged from a student’s question – the distance around Pluto at the equator is the same as the distance from Sydney to Darwin and back.

Things have been going up and down in Year 7 lately as they exercise their problem-solving skills and their construction ability in designing and making roller-coasters. The variety of design is amazing! Speaking of variety, Year 9 has been investigating biodiversity and ecology and there is no string left in the Science Department as it has all been used in showing the complexity of the energy relationships in even fairly straight-forward ecosystems.

Year 12 Biology got their thinking caps on (see picture) as Year 12 winds down to their graduation. The students are working hard, filling in the gaps and honing their skills ahead of the ordeal and we wish them all the best in their endeavours and for the future – we have really enjoyed having them in our classes over the years.

Jennifer Selinger – Head of Science