You will remember we did a bit of treasure hunting with some of our friends. We found multi layers of soils and rock. With our mums help we found some different soil scientists who helped explain  what the different layers mean. We also found some websites that describe Waikato soil profiles. Some local scientists recommended sites to us too using Mum’s twitter and facebook. Sites we looked at were the New Zealand Soil Data Maps and Soil the world beneath our feet and this site about NZ soils and Waikato ones.  The profile of the soil we found looks a lot like the Te Rapa series but we are on the other side of the river.

The best site of all was one recommended by professor Louis schipper about using cakes to show your research

We thought as budding scientists we would build our own chocolate  research cake. In our cake you can see the top layer of peat, then clay, some iron oxide areas, a layer of stones, and a sandy and silt layer.

It was fun to research the soil and make the cake. It was even better eating it.

Today we made our own hologram projector.  I had seen blog posts about making one and thought it would be cool to do myself.  I am doing my own project at school on how holograms are made so this was a fun side project.

To make a hologram projector you need:

• grid paper
• pen
• scissors
• super glue (don’t glue your fingers together)
• an old CD case
• a Stanley knife
• a smartphone or ipad

There is a cool online video of how to make it here

Here’s a vid of my end result – Projector

 

 

 

 

Inspired by the Giant Penguin exhibition at the Waikato Museum we were inspired to go treasure hunting.

There is lots of digging happening near our houses. We came across an area was abut 3 metres deep and 20 metres log and may be 5 metres across. What was very interesting is the very red soil and different levels of dirt and stones. We decided to collect some of the various stones we found.

We found out that the red in the soil is caused by iron oxide in the ground. We are very interested in the stone layer.  Would that be from an old stream bed or something else?  Since we have been here the developer has covered this area with sand.