This week we were invited by a lady called Kathy from land services to sow wild flower seeds with her, the local wildlife rangers and some members of the local church; we were excited to take her up on the offer.

We explained to Kathy that Santa always comes with us when we do anything ‘sciencey’. She was happy to let Santa come along with us to help us sow the wild flower seeds.

The day before we went, Miss Yarrow wanted to check our understanding of how plants grow. We shared all the facts that we knew about how to plant seeds, what they need to grow and how to look after them. We also listened to an interactive story online. The information from the story matched what we had already told Miss Yarrow, so she thought that we were definitely ready to sow some seeds. Santa learned a lot from us too!

On Monday morning some Kathy and some kind parent helpers came down to the school to walk up with us to Gartmorn Dam. Luckily, it was a lovely morning for us.

When we got to the dam, some adults had already prepared the soil so that it was ready for us to sow the seeds. We split into different groups and teamed up with some adults. Each group was given a tub that had a sand and wild flower seed mix in it. Our job was to ‘shake, shake, shake’ the tub so that the seeds and sand spread across all of the soil. Santa helped us out too!

Once the tubs were empty, we were given some extra poppy seeds to sprinkle across the soil as well.

One group was very excited to have found a worm when they were sowing their seeds. They think the worm popped up because of all the stomping around the ground (it must have thought it was raining).

 Before we left, we were given some packets of wild flower seeds for us to sow in the school, as well as some little minibeast hotels to build. The countryside ranger said that some of the minibeasts might have started hibernating already, so we are going to hang onto the hotels and build them in the spring time.

We had great fun with everyone and can’t wait for the flowers to grow. We are excited to have helped make a new habitat area for the wildlife up at the dam (especially for the bees).

Thanks to Kathy for inviting us up and to all the adults that made our morning fun! Keep an eye out in the Alloa Advertiser for us and Santa. We got lots of pictures taken by the photographer!

The day after our bird dance and water experiment, Miss Yarrow told us all about citizen science. She explained that scientists are too busy to do all the research that they need to do, all themselves, so they need children like us to help them.

It was our job to carry out a survey from OPAL, that would let us see how many and what kind of worms were living areas of the school ground.

We had to follow the instructions carefully, to make sure that we dug the right size of ditch.  We worked as two teams (so we had two ditches). Next we searched through the soil and turf to see if we could find any worms.

The first group found 20 worms over all and the second group found 18. There was way more worms underground compared to the day before when we had to wait for them to surface.

It started pouring down, so we weren’t able to sort and classify our worms outdoors, but we used the photographs we had taken to discuss our findings once we were back inside. There were lots of different worms; some long, some short, some fat, some thin, some dark and some lighter. We think there was different species in the ditches.

Miss Yarrow has filled in our results and will send them off to the scientists at OPAL. Santa was pleased that we were responsible citizens and he liked that we care about science in Scotland.

As well as learning about birds last week, we wanted to learn about worms too.

To start off with, Miss Yarrow read us a story called ‘Diary of a Worm’. Santa enjoyed hearing all about what the worm got up to with us.

We then talked about the new information that the book had taught it us, as well as sharing the things we remembered from our mini-beast week.

After reading the book, we decided to do an experiment outside. Our experiment was to test the best way to find worms.  We had learned that the worms don’t like it when it rains because it fills their tunnels up and we discovered that birds do a funny dance to trick that worms into thinking that it is raining. So, to do our experiment, we first split into 2 groups. One of the groups was to use water to try and get the worms to come up and the other group was to do a bird dance. We got to choose which group to be part of. Luckily, the groups were even to keep the experiment fair.

Before we went out, we made predictions about which method we thought would be the best. 15 of us thought that the water would bring the most worms up and 8 of us thought that the dancing would work best, because birds usually get lots of worms that way. Miss Yarrow liked that we were using our knowledge and problem solving to think of reasons for our predictions.

We went outside onto 2 bits of grass close by each other. We waited until both groups were ready to begin. When it was time, one group started dancing and the other poured water (but stayed still like statues). Miss Yarrow and Mrs Beveridge timed us, and when it was time to stop, we had to carefully search the grass for any worms. Santa had a go with both groups so that he could see everything that was going on.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the best day for worm finding! Between the two groups, we only managed to find one worm, and that was from the water group.

We decided that the ground must have been far too dry where the dancers were. We had previously learned that worms breathe through their skin and that if they are too dry they might not survive, so we thought that was why they weren’t being tricked  by us!

It didn’t matter that our predictions weren’t accurate, we enjoyed having a go at guessing and had fun doing our experiment. Santa had fun too!