More Aquaponics

Lesson: Science

Class: Year 6 Year: 2025 - 2026

Today was very exciting in the world of our aquaponics work – we got the fish.  We had a grand naming ceremony (which caused great excitement and a certain amount of squabbling) and released them into the pod.  We decided, in the spirit of equity, to have one male and one female name and voted for, Emmanuelle and Shelly respectively. (J7) and Swim Shady and Flopper (J8)

To ensure their wellbeing, we learned about water chemistry and used testing strips to measure the levels of nitrate, nitrite, chlorine, water hardness, carbonate and pH.  We looked at safe measures and recorded our results on the Future Food Heroes Dashboard.  We know that we will need to do this weekly.  We are getting additional testing strips for ammonia. 

We had four tables and each table had two strips.  We agreed that all of the strips should look the same as they are recording information from a single water source.

Now that the food source for the plants is available, we transferred the plants which had been growing in the propagator for the last three weeks.  We are now all set up to produce our crop of lettuce and monitor the growth of our plants.