Primary 3a have been finding out about deforestation.  We all decided as a class that we are against deforestation having looked at the pros and cons.  We then chose to write a persuasive letter to a large company who cuts down the rainforest for paper.

The Rowling and Wilson group wrote a letter together.  You can read our letter below.

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are writing to tell you that deforestation is disgraceful.  According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, an estimated 18 million acres of forest are lost each year.  We think this is wrong for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, deforestation harms animals.  Up to 28 thousand species are to become extinct within the next 25 years because of deforestation.  Animals lose their habitats and become endangered.  Animals are not able to find their food so they start to get sick and die.  Animals like monkeys might get hurt because the trees are falling down.  Birds that are in the rainforest won’t be able to build their nests and lay eggs.  Fruit bats that live in the rainforest won’t be able to hang off the trees.  Tree frogs won’t be able to climb up trees. Surely you should notice that you are destroying animals’ habitats and letting them become extinct?

I believe that cutting down trees is wrong because you are destroying plants which give us medicine.  Destroying medicine means people who are sick won’t get better.  If you continue to destroy the rainforest you will make us lose 121 natural remedies which can be used for medicine.  In the future we won’t discover new medicine if deforestation continues.

Cutting down the rainforest makes us lose 20% of our oxygen.  20% of the world’s oxygen is produced in the Amazon.  Oxygen is what we need to keep us alive, so of course we believe that deforestation should be stopped.

I hope the person responsible will take all of these facts in and think carefully before you keep going and destroying the rainforest.  Thank you for reading our letter.

Yours faithfully,

Primary 3a

Today we went to Amazonia. Amazonia is an indoor rainforest.

A lady called Kerry took us on a tour around Amazonia. On the tour we saw lots of animals like frogs (Miss McLean is very scared of frogs!), anacondas, parrots, goeldi’s monkeys, lizards, piranhas, a tarantula, a toucan and macaws.

We went into the nocturnal area. There were animals inside who come out in the dark, so the nocturnal area was very gloomy. Inside we saw fruit bats, boa constrictors, scorpions and kinkajous.

After we had been on the tour we went into the handling room. In this room we were allowed to hold real rainforest and desert animals. First we held hissing cockroaches called Ralph. When the cockroaches are scared they hiss like a snake to scare their predators away. Cockroaches will eat anything they get the chance to – even smelly socks! Next we touched Bubbles the fat tailed gecko. Bubbles’ tail can come off if he wants to escape from a predator but it makes him poorly. Last but not least we held Ziggy the royal python. Ziggy can only eat things which will fit in his mouth. He killed his prey by strangling it – he was not a venomous snake. He has over 500 weak and bendy bones in his body so we had to be very careful and not squeeze him – we didn’t want to break any of his bones. We also got to pass around a snake skeleton in a box so we could see what Ziggy looks like inside. Kerry told Sofia and Greta that Cleopatra used to wear royal pythons as bracelets and that is how they got their name.

We went into the interactive room next with a lady called Amy. We played a game where we had to catch as many butterflies as we could. In the next game we had to make a big rainstorm by clapping our hands as much as we could. When we were done we saw some pictures of us playing the game. At the end, Amy told us that she heard us talking about the rainforest and deforestation. She said she had been working in Amazonia for four years and we gave the best facts she had ever heard!

“World Book Day was awesome!” – Sean

Today was World Book Day and we all dressed up as a character from a book.

We started the day by planning a story that we are going to enter into a competition. If the school supplies the best entries we will win £500 for Netherlee! We will also get a real book of all our stories.

We went into P2D and watched a video about Michael Morporgo and what techniques he uses to write his books. We also told primary 2 what we had dressed up as.

After break we thought about why we couldn’t live without books. Sorcha said that books are like paper friends filled with knowledge. Miss McLean liked that a lot!

Here is some of us dressed up. Can you guess what we are dressed up as?

We have been learning to use search engines such as Google.

Search engines are websites where you can search for information or for websites. You can look up things that you don’t know or want to double check.

We have been thinking about when you might need to use Google. You can use it to find images. You can also use Google to find a map if you need to go somewhere that you have never been before. If you need to get a train somewhere and you aren’t sure what times the trains depart from your station, you could look that up on Google. If you were going to see a movie you could look up what times the film is on using a search engine. If you were not feeling well, you can look up your symptoms online to try and work out what is wrong with you. If you want to do some internet shopping you could Google the shop to find the website.

We used Google to research animals because our Science topic is Living and Non-Living Things. When you Google something, you just type in the keywords because if you don’t you will get too many websites to choose from. Once we had researched an animal on Google, we also learned how to find images and to copy and paste them into a word document.

Sam and Greta modelling what Google looks like – how excited does Sam look?!