Trip to Crathes Castle

On Tuesday we had our trip to the local Crathes Castle.  We were all very excited and had been counting down the days until the trip since we found out we were going!

We started our day on the bus out to Crathes Castle. We all enjoyed looking out for the statue of the famous legend Rob Roy on the bridge in Culter. We got to Crathes and it was a beautiful day!

The first thing we did was meet our tour guide, Charlie. He was very friendly and knew lots of facts about the history of the castle. He was very impressed with everything we knew about Robert the Bruce and how he gave the ground to the Burnett of Leys family who built and owned Crathes Castle.

We started the tour in the kitchen of the castle. We had to guess what a lot of the objects were used for. One was used for grounding oatmeal and another was used for pancakes!

We heard all about the legend of the ‘Green Lady’ and how some visitors see her in the castle. We had to be careful going up and down the stairs as there was a trip step on the 11^th step and they were very steep!

We went into the room where they would put people on trial. We had a judge and a note-taker and the class had to decide what the criminal had done wrong!

We were able to spot some of the features that we know are in a castle such as arrow slits, battlements and we spotted where the original portcullis would have been.

Next we had our snacks and a bit of time to run around in the grounds of the castle. After that, we got into our small groups and did our scavenger hunt. This tied in nicely with our new topic, ‘A Bug’s Life’ as we were looking at nature and had to find a lot of different things. We had a list of things to find. The list included finding something squidgy, a sign we know people had been there before us, something soft, something close to the ground etc. Some of us went into the walled garden to do the scavenger hunt whilst other groups chose to go into the woods!

Lunch time was next! We had a lovely day for it and some of us had a game of rounders after we had finished eating.

We then spent our time taking part in an art activity. Again, we used our clipboards to lean on. First of all, we had to draw the outline of the castle as accurately as we could. We were in the perfect position on the castle lawn to allow us to do this! Next, we had to use detail and more accuracy to draw the windows and door. Finally we had to add as much detail as we could – flags, plants, benches, railings, decorative plaques so that our pictures were as realistic as we could possibly make them.

To end our trip, we had a small bit of time left to play in the park! We ran off all our remaining energy before getting back on the bus to go back to school. A lot of us were so tired that we fell asleep on the bus!

We had a brilliant trip and couldn’t have asked for better weather. Some of us even said it was the best school trip we’d ever been on! It was a great way of ending our ‘Castles’ topic from last term and getting focussed on our new natural topic. We will be doing some follow up work next week using the results from our scavenger hunt and we are going to write thank you letters to Charlie for his fantastic tour.

Finally, a big thank you to Mrs Smith, Mrs Close, Mrs Broadribb and Mrs Robertson for coming and helping on our trip. It was much appreciated 🙂

Have a lovely long weekend everyone!