Yesterday was an exciting day in P1B as our 5 caterpillars transformed into 5 beautiful butterflies.

We agreed that since butterflies only have a short life it would be best to release them outside as soon as possible.  The butterflies were a little reluctant to leave and spent a few minutes saying goodbye to their friends…they were a little tickly!                                                                                                                                                         They moved onto the branches of a bush on the edge of the playing field.  We hope they come and visit us at playtime.  

This was our last session with Wildthings and we went rockpooling at West Beach. Ruaridh and James got us to risk assess before we went near the rocks – we are getting so good at doing this!

We found loads of creatures in the rockpools – lots of hermit crabs, a starfish, a sand worm, shore crabs and a brittle starfish with a broken leg. Nets and sieves were used to catch them all carefully and then we put them into trays with water. We let the hermit crabs crawl on our hands and saw their pincers shooting out of the shells.

James did a quiz with us to check what we had learned at all the Coastal Classrooms sessions. We passed every unit and he thought we were awesome!

Ruaridh and James helped us to build  a safety circle before we learnt what is needed for fire making – fuel, heat and oxygen. Ruaridh lit a fire really quickly, even though it was very windy. Once the fire was burning we were allowed to toast a marshmallow on a stick – delicious!

The session ended with us gathering in a sticky toe circle and sharing our favourite Coastal Classroom activities. James said that the best bit for him was our very good behaviour and how we had learnt so much.

Mrs Gray and Mrs Summers were so pleased and proud of us.

Thank you Wildthings – we’ve all had a brilliant time and we have learnt so much about life on the coast, coastal creatures and how we can help with conservation!

We measured various containers using water, sand and rice.   We had to estimate first of all, then we measured, counting how many small containers it took to fill a larger container.

When we arrived in school on Monday 30th May, the butterflies were there.  We were all very excited about this and had a very good look at them all.   They were released in the afternoon.   Are they still in the school grounds?  Maybe they have flown away.

Last Friday morning, P3 helped to organise and deliver an assembly for the children who will be starting P1 after the summer holidays. We told the children all about Hythehill Ted, our teddy from nursery, who is due to go to big school too!

We watched a slide show and P3 spoke clearly and confidently, using the microphone to make ourselves heard. Mrs Thomas played the piano and we sang two songs.

Afterwards the pre school children were treated to some juice and biscuits, served by the P3s who then chatted to their little guests.We all enjoyed meeting the younger children and look forward to seeing them at school.

Well done P3 – Mrs Gray and Mrs Summers were very proud of you!

Today we worked with Wildthings leaders, James and Katie and Naomi and Lorna from the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

The session started with us gathering in a sticky toe circle to find out all about being a scientist. We learnt how to do a Shore watch with Lorna from WDCS and then started completing our survey sheets. For this we had to use the binoculars to look closely for sea life. There were no dolphins but we spotted sea birds and a cute little pied wagtail.

Next we discovered how big porpoises, bottlenose dolphins and Minke whales are. Naomi and Mrs Summers used the tape measure to show us how big a blue whale is – we ran out of tape measure!

Naomi from WDCS showed us parts of dolphins – skulls, teeth and the bones inside pectoral fins. We felt a sperm whale’s tooth and touched baleen from a whale.

Before we headed back to school we played the Dolphin Ecolocation game -it was so hard for the “dolphin” to catch the “fish”when there was lots of noise from us pretending to be boats.

Mrs Summers tried being a dolphin too. It took her ages to locate Summer, the fish! See you next week for the last session.

In P1A we used the scales to weigh things in the classroom.   We had to first of all have a guess (estimate) as to how many cubes it would take to balance the scales, then we weighed the object and found out how many cubes it took for the scales to balance.  We worked in our trios and we took turns at doing the work.

Today in primary 1B we have been investigating weight.  Mrs Carey made us scales using hangers and cups, we then set about finding objects to weigh.   Our challenge was to find two objects and see which one was the heaviest.