Environmental Science – STEAM

The Environmental Science and STEAM curriculum at MGPS provides the opportunity for students to engage with content from the chemical, physical, earth and biological sciences. Throughout the year, students participate in a range of hands-on STEAM activities, encouraging collaboration, sustainable practices, problem solving and creativity. Students also have the opportunity to join our weekly garden club offering; vegetable and fruit planting, recycling initiatives, composting, flower potting, repurposing items, Indigenous plant education and pruning. Our program seeks to develop and expand student curiosity and understanding about the changing world we live in both locally and on a global scale, and how we can all play a part in caring for our environment and wildlife into the future.

Junior (P-2):

Throughout the year our junior students cover topics including:

• Where our food comes from and the journey from farm to fork, including how food is sourced from our natural environment.
• What things are made of and how certain materials are selected for purpose.
• How living things grow and change and what they need for survival.
• Why and how digital systems are used for communication.
• Earth’s natural resources and how we can care for these precious things in a sustainable way.
• Coding and programming basic software.
• How people, animals and plants change throughout the seasons and how first Nations Australian’s sustainably source foods from nature during the seasons.

The celestial objects within our Solar System.

Middle (3-4):

Throughout the year our middle students explore and investigate:

• How technology is used in food and fibre production.
• Forces and how they relate to engineering, building and design.
• Different sources of water and the key processes in the water cycle, considering why we are encouraged to save and recycle water through a water filter experiment.
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ connection with their land and country and the importance of this connection, including a local focus on the Aboriginal heritage of the Dja Dja Wurrung.
• What living things depend on to survive and how humans can use the environment to assist in a survival situation.
• Earth’s relationship with the Sun and how the Sun, Earth and Moon interact.
• The life cycles of different animals and plants. 
• Coding programs, software and technology including robotics and circuit making.
• How we can repurpose unwanted items into something new and functional.

Senior (5-6): 

Throughout the year our senior students inquire and examine:

• Concepts of transparency, including natural and artificial light sources, undertaking investigations to observe the effects of refraction and reflection.
• How matter changes through different substances and consider the significant environmental challenge of separating a mixture such as e-waste into valuable components for re-use.
• Major geological and extreme weather events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, drought and cyclones and research scientific and technological developments in measuring, predicting and minimising the effects of natural disasters.
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ understanding, use and special connection to the night sky.
• Why technologies developed to aid space exploration have changed the way people live, work and communicate in their daily lives.
• Organisms that live in extreme environments and explore changes in physical conditions that affect the behaviour and survival of living things, including animals that migrate or hibernate.
• How people in design and technologies occupations incorporate sustainable practices and manufacturing.
• Components of digital systems and how they interact with each other to transmit data including; coding systems, how and why data is collected and used within different digital systems, and how to stay safe using online programs.