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.

Over the last few weeks we have been planting seeds and beans and watching them grow.  Here are just a few of the things we have in our classroom just now.

We are also watching some very special visitors…

We have been watching 5 caterpillars grow over the last 3 weeks.

We have been learning about the life cycle of a butterfly so we know that our caterpillars are now in the pupa stage and we are eagerly waiting to watch their transformation into butterflies.

We have moved the cocoons to the net and we had a really good look at them.  They wriggled about as we did this.  Very exciting!

Primary 1B and primary 1C got together to watch an episode of Percy the Park Keeper.  We then talked about the features of Percy’s park.   We made a huge list of the things we might find in the park.

Miss Harvey and Mrs Carey then split us into two groups and put down two huge pieces of paper and lots of felt tip pens, pencils and crayons.  We then set to work recreating Percy’s park!

Our pictures were fantastic!

We have been learning all about measuring length and width.  We started by thinking about the size of things around us and then we had a go a measuring the room using our hands or feet.  We discovered that Mrs Carey had less foot steps to get across the room and Nathan had the most – this is because Mrs Carey has big feet and Nathan has little feet.

As our learning has progressed we have started to measure objects with cubes and on Wednesday we measured the length and width of some images and compared our answers with our learning friends.

Last Friday we had some willing helpers who were on exam leave from the high school come into school to help us with our cooking.  Working in small groups we made yummy fork  biscuits.

We made so many we were able to share them with our friends.

Not only did we make biscuits but we also washed up…we could do this at home too!

In primary 2A we have been learning about the jingles that ice-cream vans play to attract the neighbour hood children. We listened to lots of jingles from a long time ago and new, modern jingles. Then we worked in groups to compose our own jingles using various chime bars.