Living Heritage -
Mapua School
Discover Tasman: The Tasbay Rocky Shore
Research Process
At the end of Term Two, the teachers introduced our topic. We brainstormed what we knew already and what we needed to find out. We talked about how we could use ICT to record our journey. We wrote research questions.
Some of our questions were:
- how many different species of seaweed are there at the McKee Domain?
- how do the creatures get their food?
- how do the sea creatures get in the rock pools?
- which creatures are more common in the high tide pools and which are more common at low tide?
In Term Three, we made a timeline, set goals and objectives, invited guests to speak, arranged two visits to the rock pools and organised our data collecting process.
Richard de Hamel was our guest speaker. He gave us lots of pre-visit information that really inspired everyone.
Our first visit was a fantastic day. We divided into our class groups, and then into research groups of four children with a parent, a hoop, our tally and identification sheets and inquiry questions. The hoop was used as a focus area over a rocky pool in each of the three zones which were observed for 20 minutes. We tallied sea creatures living in those areas and made two observational drawings.
On our second visit, a fortnight later, we repeated the process of inquiry to enable us to make comparisons of our tallies. Some of us took photographs at the rocky shore of our class mates and lots of the creatures.
Back in the classroom we collated and compared our data.
We used our observational drawings to create a rock pool picture using KidPix, and to label our creatures.
