Auckland, New Zealand
Our Year 4 class of girls has worked together to complete this report. We worked in separate groups to collect data in our squares and then we each took a separate school to compare our information to. Each of our groups put their square down in a different part of the school and on a different surface type.
Before we began we made some hypotheses about our findings:
· We think we will have completely different things in our squares because we are in the southern hemisphere and it is spring for us.
· We are a small island country surrounded by large oceans so maybe we do not have any of the same insects plants and trees as other countries.
Group 1 – We compared our square to Capps Middle School.
Both our schools found an ant in our squares. The weeds that Capps found had their leaves out, we found weeds also, but their leaves were closed in. They had a variety of grasses. They also had purple and white flowers, we only had daisies. We didn't have any gum wrappers in our square.
Group 2 – We compared our square to The Sullivans School in Japan. We had quite a few things that were similar:- dirt, ants, weeds, grass, mud, plastic and small rocks. They also had things we didn't like, a snail, a worm, a spider, metal and a big rock.
Group 3 – We were comparing with St Josephs School. They had lots of living creatures, mud and sand worms. The things we had the same were paper, small rocks but different sizes, weeds and bugs. We are wondering what the snap dragons are they had in their square?
Group 4 – We compared our square to St George's Independent School. Our square was on the soft-fall under a climbing playground so really the only two things we had were some plastic lunch-wrap rubbish and the plastic soft-fall matting. Their square had lots of living and moving things in it.
Group 5 – We compared to Woodlands Elementary School in Florida. Things we found the same were – ant, beetles, flying bugs, spider, tree, sand and dirt. The different things they found were – lizards, grass, weed, mushrooms, paper, plastic, small rocks, mud and squirrels. We have some questions now – What type of lizards did you find, because we do have some small lizards in New Zealand? How long was the squirrel in your square – we don't have squirrels in New Zealand? What are love bugs?