Spring school holidays 2022
We hope you all have a wonderful school holidays break. We will run another Issue next Sunday, October2nd, and then have No Issue on Sunday October 9th so we can spend some time with our own youngsters in the week leading up to that Sunday. Have a great break!
National Bird Week + Aussie Bird Count 2022
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Ho ho ho ... pencil in this date
The popular Christmas card competition has been expanded to more primary school students.
‘All I want for Christmas’ is the theme of this year’s competition for students to design a Christmas card for the Minister for Education and Early Learning, Sarah Mitchell, and senior department executives.
The annual competition is now open to students from Kindergarten to Year 6.
The winning artist will have their artwork featured on the Minister’s 2022 Christmas card and receive a book pack and 20 copies of the card. The runners up will feature on cards for the Department of Education Secretary, Georgina Harrisson, and Deputy Secretaries – School Performance, Murat Dizdar and Leanne Nixon.
The competition has previously been open only to Kindergarten students. Last year’s winning image from Hayley Shepard from Surveyors Creek Public School in Glenmore Park featured a dream of waking up to a puppy in Santa’s stocking.
Doggone it: Hayley Shepherd and Education Minister Sarah Mitchell hold Hayley's winning design.
How to enter
Schools can submit artwork entries on behalf of students by email to mcc@det.nsw.edu.au by 5pm on 17 October 2022. Please name saved artwork files in the format of schoolname-firstname-lastname.png, such as Christmas-PS-Santa-Claus.png.
Artworks can be created in any medium but should be no larger than 21cm x 30cm (A4). The artworks may be in portrait or landscape format.
The winning artists will be notified by 29 October 2022.
ALKOO OF PALM BEACH.
When first I saw Alkoo, she was a pretty, young mother koala with a soft, grey furry coat, a white front, and ears fringed with feathery fur. She opened her bright eyes so wide when she gazed about the bush that she looked as if she was always surprised, though really she was not, for she knew every opossum and every cockatoo and parrot that lived in the gum forest near Palm Beach.
Alkoo’s coat was so silky, her eyes were so bright, her large nose so handsome that the koala colony thought Antony very lucky to have won her for his wife. But Alkoo did not agree with her friends. She thought she was the lucky one to have so kind and goo d-looking a husband, and when her little son, Bunyarra, was born, she was so proud that she hardly knew what to do.
The days and weeks passed quietly by, and Bunyarra grew steadily till he was big enough and strong enough to climb out of his mother’s pouch and look about. It is hard to say whether Alkoo or Antony was the prouder of him. They both doted on him, and he would have become thoroughly spoiled had not Alkoo been a really good mother and punished him when he was disobedient or cheeky.
Alkoo and Bunyarra. —Photo, “ The Sun.”
If it had not been for Bunyarra’s curiosity, trouble would not have fallen on Alkoo. One Saturday afternoon he set off on his own when his parents were both fast asleep, for it was a hot afternoon towards the end of the summer.
Bunyarra trotted and hopped as fast as he could, and soon reached the edge of the concrete motor-road. There he sat in the shade of a little gum-tree and watched. He was so small and so much in the shade that no one noticed him. He loved watching the cars. What a lot he would have to tell everyone when he got home !
He was just feeling a little hungry, and thinking that he had better start for home, when he heard a soft grunt, and turned to see his mother. She did not say much, but was clearly very frightened about him and very cross. Bunyarra was beginning to explain how clever he was, and to tell Alkoo all about the cars, when a dog barked quite near them, and before Bunyarra had time to run away, a large, rough-coated dog sprang upon his mother, barking furiously.
Bunyarra ran away, and climbed a little tree. He could not quite see all that happened to his mother. At first he hardly dared to look. He knew that the dog had hurt her, for it had her down on the ground, and rolled her over, and then she screamed with pain.
Bunyarra was dreadfully upset. He sobbed and cried, but no one paid any attention to him. A boy and a girl came running up to his mother. They called off the dog and the boy picked up Alkoo. One of her arms hung limp, and one of her ears was bleeding. The boy carried her to a car, and a man drove him and the girl and Alkoo away.
Alkoo’s broken arm hurt her badly, so did her torn ear, but much worse to bear than the pain was her anxiety about Bunyarra. Was he still by the road ? Had he gone home to his father ? Could he find his way home ?
Alkoo was so terribly worried about Bunyarra that she hardly noticed what was happening to herself, nor did she care. The car was travelling fast, and after what seemed a long time it stopped.
“I’ll carry her in,” the big strong man told his son.
Alkoo knew, both from his voice and his touch, that he was a kind man. If only she could tell him about Bunyarra.
She was left alone in a big, bare room for what seemed a long time. Then the man came back and brought another man with him, who sat down and took Alkoo on his lap and felt her all over. He set her arm in a splint and bathed her ear. Alkoo began to cry like a baby.
The doctor stroked her and soothed her.
‘’Why, she must have had a baby in her pouch not many weeks ago ! It’s her baby she’s crying about, not the pain. I thought that wasn’t a pain cry. I’m afraid that baby will be killed, but we can’t go and look for it to-night.”
Although it was late, Alkoo was taken that night by the doctor to Koala Park. There she was put into the hospital, and made comfortable in a large enclosure where boughs of green formed a little arbour.
Alkoo after her broken arm had been heated. —Photo, N. BURNET, Koala Park.
The Secretary of the Koala Club, Mr. Edwards, had a telephone call late the next afternoon. Two children had found a baby koala at Palm Beach, sitting in a tree by the roadside, crying as if its heart would break. A dog was at the bottom of the tree barking at the poor little thing.
The children had carried Bunyarra home, but their parents did not want them to have him for a pet, for they knew how difficult it would be to get the right leaves for him.
Mr. Edwards, who will do anything to save a koala from pain or unhappiness, and who had heard all about Alkoo, thought that the koala the children had rescued must be Alkoo's baby. So he went off in his car, and found the house at Palm Beach where the children lived.
The children had gone to bed, but he was greeted by their mother. They had put Bunyarra in the tool shed for the night, but he had lolloped round and round, crying all the time. Mr. Edwards was taken to the boy’s bedroom, and there he saw a curly-headed boy with a little koala snuggled up against him, both sound asleep.
Mr . Edwards hated disturbing them, but he had motored a long way to fetch Bunyarra. The boy did not wake when Bunyarra was lifted gently from his bed, nor did Bunyarra till he was in the car, lying rolled up in a shawl on the seat. Then he began to cry his hardest, and he kept on crying until Mr. Edwards reached his home. He could not take him out to Koala Park that night. It was too late, so he put him in the washhouse, and arranged sticks so that he had a nice fork in which to sleep.
Bunyarra refused to use the perch provided for him, and sat in a corner and cried very loudly. This woke Mr. Edwards's little boy, who came running downstairs to see what was the matter.
“ I can make him stop crying,” he said at once. “Let me take him to bed.” He carried him upstairs and took him into bed with him, and there Bunyarra snuggled down against him and slept till the morning.
The next afternoon Bunyarra was taken out to Koala Park. Alkoo did not know how to express her joy when her baby was brought to her. The doctor was afraid Bunyarra would hurt his mother’s broken arm, but Alkoo would not be satisfied till she had smelled him all over, and combed out his coat as well as she could manage.
Then the Director of the Park took Bunyarra away, for he saw that he was going to be too much for Alkoo.
Now Bunyarra needed a mother to keep him in order by day and to cuddle him at night, and there was a very kind old granny, who badly needed a baby to look after.
The Director of the Park, Mr. Burnet, had had to punish old Booraby for stealing babies from their mothers. She had been shut up in the sun room for two days, and now he was glad to be able to give her Bunyarra to look after.
Bunyarra and Booraby. —Photo, N. BURNET, Koala Park.
She was so delighted and proud that she fetched all the best leaves for Bunyarra, and chose the best forks in the trees for sleeping. She had had four babies of her own, so she knew just how to cuddle Bunyarra.
But Bunyarra’s time with Granny Booraby was to end sooner than had been expected. As Bunyarra grew bigger and heavier his strong claws gripped Booraby’s fur too hard and pulled out great pieces, for, at seventeen, a koala’s fur is not nearly so close and strong as when she is young.
So a change of foster mothers had to be made, and Lallewoon, a young mother who had just brought up a baby, was chosen to look after Bunyarra. She had a splendid fur coat into which Bunyarra could put his claws and grip as hard as he liked without pulling out any tufts. Bunyarra was happy with Lallewoon, and was very popular at Koala Park, for he was the only young koala just then, and his adventures made visitors anxious to see him.
—From “Little Teddy Bear,” by LYDIA S. ELIOT. Price, 5/9. (Collins).
This book is recommended for school libraries. New South Wales. Department of Education. (). The school magazine of literature for our boys and girls September 1st, 1940, pages 115-118 Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-774926280
Curious Kids: how is lava made?
How is lava made? – Leon, age 7, Sydney, Australia
Thank you for a great question Leon!
Have you ever seen lava? What does it look like to you? Lava can be red, fiery and liquid or cool, dark and solid, like in the picture above.
In the picture you can see red hot lava, flowing over black solid rock where the lava has cooled. Lava is molten rock, melted because of very high temperatures, much, much hotter than you would see on the surface of the earth.
Can you imagine how hot it must be to melt rock? This gives a clue about how lava is made, somewhere with very high temperatures below Earth’s surface.
While underground, the liquid rock is called magma; it becomes lava when it flows onto the planet’s surface, usually through a volcano. When the lava cools – that’s the dark solid ground you see in the image – it is called “igneous” rock. This means “fire” in Latin (scientists use a lot of Latin words), so it is fire rock.
To understand how lava is made and where it comes from, we need to journey below Earth’s surface – which we can’t do, because it would be too dangerous. Imagine trying to travel somewhere hot enough to melt rock, what would that do to you?
Instead, we can look at the structure of Earth in the image below and imagine the journey.
We would travel down through Earth’s crust, into the mantle and then into the core. Once there, we would discover that the crust and mantle are mostly solid rock. After the mantle we would notice the liquid outer core and then the solid metal inner core.
In Earth’s core the temperatures are very hot, usually between 5,000 and 7,000 degrees Celsius. Think about this to compare: chocolate starts melting at around 80℃ and tap water boils at 100℃. This very hot core acts like an oven for Earth, heating it from within.
Along the way we might find some magma in the mantle where it is made, in a space between the outer mantle and Earth’s crust. Magma is formed through heat and pressure – imagine squeezing a ball of plasticine as hard as you can: that is you putting pressure on the ball. While the mantle is not as hot as the liquid core, there is a lot more pressure. The pressure is caused by movement in the rocky mantle, pressing against the crust.
This pressure, and the temperatures from Earth’s “oven” at the core, cause rock to melt and magma is formed. The magma moves to Earth’s surface through openings – sometimes these openings are volcanoes – and forms new crust.
Often the new crust forms into islands, like many of the Pacific islands. This happens because liquid comes out through openings on the sea floor and cools, forming land.
You can watch this video for the story from Mother Earth herself. But be warned: never put rocks in a fire to try and melt them, some might explode! I’ll let you ask about that another time.
Janice Crerar, Lecturer in Education, Charles Darwin University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How do keys open locks?
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.
How are keys made, and how do they open locks? – Noli, age 12, Wisconsin
Have you ever wondered how keys work? I teach a course in computer security where we learn how locks function – and also how they can be broken or bypassed. We do this because locks teach important principles about security in general.
If you look closely at a key, you’ll see its top edge has a bunch of V-shaped valleys. If you inspect the key more closely, perhaps with a ruler, you’ll notice the bottoms of these valleys are equally spaced. The depth of the valleys encodes a sequence that is accepted by the lock, with each valley contributing one value to the combination.
Inside the lock is a cylinder – the part that moves when you stick your key in and turn it. The key can turn only if all its valleys are the right depth for your particular lock.
But how does your lock detect whether your key’s valleys have the right sequence of depths?
Inside the lock are vertical shafts, one over each valley of the key. In each shaft is a pair of metal pins that can freely slide up and down. Depending on where the pins are, they can block the cylinder from turning and prevent the lock from opening. This happens whenever a pin is partially sticking into or out of the cylinder.
When you stick a key in the lock, the pins fall into the valleys. If a valley is too high, it causes a pin to stick out and jam the cylinder. If a valley is too low, the pin sinks too low and the pin above it will sink into the cylinder and jam it. However, if the right key is inserted with the valleys at just the right depths, none of the pins get in the way.
Keys are made by placing a blank key into a grinding machine that is programmed to carve out the exact valleys that are needed. A locksmith can also change a lock by removing its pins and fitting it with new ones to match a chosen key.
In computer security, we say that security relies on “something you know, something you have or something you are.” A password is an example of something you know. A key is an example of something you have. A fingerprint would be an example of something you are. But as you can see, a key is also very much like a password, except it is encoded by grinding a piece of metal.
For this reason, you shouldn’t ever post a picture of your house key on the internet. That would be like posting a picture of a credit card or a password – someone could use the photo to duplicate the key.
It is also possible to unlock or “pick” locks without a key. By sliding a thin piece of metal into the cylinder and gently pushing the pins to the correct height one by one, locks can be opened. However, it takes a great deal of skill and practice to do this.
What does this teach us about security? First, we must make keys secret by making a very large number of possible keys, so that the right one is hard to guess or build. It’s the same for passwords. Second, it’s important to engineer a lock or computer program that requires every bit of the key or password to be exactly correct.
It’s important to study the inner workings of locks and computer programs to understand how their design might allow someone to break them.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
Scott Craver, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, State University of New York
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Why are there seven days in a week?
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.
Why are there seven days in a week? – Henry E., age 8, Somerville, Massachusetts
Waiting for the weekend can often seem unbearable, a whole six days between Saturdays. Having seven days in a week has been the case for a very long time, and so people don’t often stop to ask why.
Most of our time reckoning is due to the movements of the planets, Moon and stars. Our day is equal to one full rotation of the Earth around its axis. Our year is a revolution of the Earth around the Sun, which takes 365 and ¼ days, which is why we add an extra day in February every four years, for a leap year.
But the week and the month are a bit trickier. The phases of the Moon do not exactly coincide with the solar calendar. The Moon cycle is 27 days and seven hours long, and there are 13 phases of the Moon in each solar year.
Some of the earliest civilizations observed the cosmos and recorded the movements of planets, the Sun and Moon. The Babylonians, who lived in modern-day Iraq, were astute observers and interpreters of the heavens, and it is largely thanks to them that our weeks are seven days long.
The reason they adopted the number seven was that they observed seven celestial bodies – the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. So, that number held particular significance to them.
Other civilizations chose other numbers – like the Egyptians, whose week was 10 days long; or the Romans, whose week lasted eight.
The Babylonians divided their lunar months into seven-day weeks, with the final day of the week holding particular religious significance. The 28-day month, or a complete cycle of the Moon, is a bit too large a period of time to manage effectively, and so the Babylonians divided their months into four equal parts of seven.
The number seven is not especially well-suited to coincide with the solar year, or even the months, so it did create a few inconsistencies.
However, the Babylonians were such a dominant culture in the Near East, especially in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., that this, and many of their other notions of time – such as a 60-minute hour – persisted.
The seven-day week spread throughout the Near East. It was adopted by the Jews, who had been captives of the Babylonians at the height of that civilization’s power. Other cultures in the surrounding areas got on board with the seven-day week, including the Persian empire and the Greeks.
Centuries later, when Alexander the Great began to spread Greek culture throughout the Near East as far as India, the concept of the seven-day week spread as well. Scholars think that perhaps India later introduced the seven-day week to China.
Finally, once the Romans began to conquer the territory influenced by Alexander the Great, they too eventually shifted to the seven-day week. It was Emperor Constantine who decreed that the seven-day week was the official Roman week and made Sunday a public holiday in A.D. 321.
The weekend was not adopted until modern times in the 20th century. Although there have been some recent attempts to change the seven-day week, it has been around for so long that it seems like it is here to stay.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
This article has been updated to correct the details on Earth’s revolution around the Sun.
Kristin Heineman, Instructor in History, Colorado State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Archive of millions of Historical Children’s Books All Digitised: Free to download or Read Online
Enter the 1: Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature here, where you can browse several categories, search for subjects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book covers, download XML versions, and read all of the 2: over 6,000 books in the collection with comfortable reader views.
Find 3: more classics in the collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.
Ingleside Riders Group Inc. (IRG) is a not for profit incorporated association and is run solely by volunteers. It was formed in 2003 and provides a facility known as “Ingleside Equestrian Park” which is approximately 9 acres of land between Wattle St and McLean St, Ingleside. 
Profile: Pittwater Baseball Club
Profile: Avalon Soccer Club
Avalon Bilgola Amateur Swimming Club ProfileWe swim at Bilgola rock pool on Saturday mornings (8:45am till 11:30am). Our season runs between October and March
Profile Bayview Yacht Racing Association (BYRA)Mona Vale Mountain Cub Scouts
Find out more about all the fun you can have at Mona Vale Mountain Cub Scouts Profile –
our Profile pages aren’t just about those who can tell you about Pittwater before you were born, they’re also about great clubs and activities that you too can get involved in!