This week Primary 7 had an outdoor learning workshop arranged by Karen in the Nursery.
We went over to the park and an Ecologist also named Karyn put together a few environmental exercises such as: working out the age of the trees, collecting different leaves, labelling parts of a tree and using a maths experiment to measure how tall the trees were.

In Autumn all the leaves on the trees change colour because of a chemical called chlorophyll, then the leaves fall off the tree. Trees that do that are called deciduous trees. Trees that stay the same all year round are called evergreen trees.

Karyn also taught us several different types of trees such as: birch, oak, spruce, cherry blossom, silver birch and horse chestnut.
Our first activity was to gather different types of leaves. Altogether we had to gather 12 different types of leaves. Some of them were; beech, birch, holly,(do not touch holly, it’s spiky!) oak, ash, alder, horse chestnut (a conquer tree) silver birch and sycamore.
The second activity was figuring out how old the trees were. One way of figuring out the age is cutting it open and counting the rings inside of the trunk but we weren’t going to do that! So instead, we got a piece of rope which had a knot every 25 centimetres and wrapped it round a tree. Then we counted each gap in 10s and that is how old the tree is.

There were also other activities including races to label parts of a tree.
Our overall experience would be 5 stars as we thoroughly enjoyed the activities!

By Talia and Hannah