eco – Banton Biggies

Focus Day Sustainability

Today was a focus day at Banton Primary. We are looking at some of our Eco Schools Action Plan targets around litter.

We started the day by litter picking around the community and in Dow’s Wood. Banton is a very tidy place and we did not get too much litter!

Back in class we weighed the litter from different groups and categorised it into different types. We used numbers on our iPads to analyse and make graphs of the results.

The winning group was Juliet, Alexia & Robert. They found 41 pieces of litter weighing 450 grams.

We also read the stories of Litterbug Doug and Michael Recycle to our p1-3 pals.

In the afternoon we finished our graphs, started designing super hero logos for a litter battling super hero.

Finally we presented what we had been doing to the rest of the school. We had an enjoyable busy day that was a break from our usual program.

Last week we joined in this video conference. It was in 3 sections all based on wether.
First we heard from Jess Lilley, Edinburgh Zoo about life in the water. We saw the penguins at the zoo and found out about a fish none of us knew about, the flapper skate.

We then heard the story of the Mermaid of the Clyde, told by Allison Galbraith. The last workshop was by Joe Wilkin-Oxley from Keep Scotland Beautiful. He explainsd about water, how much we use and how to save it.

This was all very interesting. During the week most of the primary sevens were off to Kilsyth Academy, but the rest of the Biggies got busy writing stories about mythical water creatures and working on scale in maths using the Flapper Skate to practise scaling down & up.

eco focus day

We had an eco focus day last week.

In preparation we did some litter picking on Thursday:

A small load of rubbish

On Friday we started thinking about What A Wonderful World we live in (cue song).

We joined in with the #showthelove tag organised by The Climate Coalition, and decorated some Green Hearts.

The then looked at the Lyrics of What a Wonderful World and used them to write some poems, here are a few:

Earth awaking
To wake up in the morning to see the sun awaking,
To see the grass left with a white covered layer,
To see the tree swaying with the tiniest of breeze,
To see the deer grazing at peace,
To hear the birds chirping happy to be alive,
To feel the earth awakening ready to thrive,
To not know what’s coming next in you life,
To see each animal all worked up inside,
Our earth has things we can’t believe but sometimes it’s the simplest thing that puts us at ease.

By Alice

Wonderful world
Small world, big world,
Rolling around the sun world.
Cold world, hot world,
Full of mud world!

Animal world, dry world,
Weather world, colourful world,
Massive sized world.

Plant world, water world,
Full of food world,
Gravity world, noises world.
Full of wildlife world,
We’re killing our home world.

Rhuaridh A

Wonderful world
Big and small,
Tall and short,
Beautiful and ugly I love it all.

Sea and land,
Fish and animals,
I know all like the back of my hand.

Hazel

We then though about more practice things, how deal with rubbish in School and at home. Where our water comes from and how to stop it all being wasted.

Finally we made some green seed bomb hearts to share some flowers!

A small load of rubbish

On Thursday, the day before our eco focus day we headed down to the MUGA and park to pick up litter. It looks like or hard work earlier had paid off. We found much less litter.

Biggies Litter Pick

As part of our eco schools program the whole school was out and about picking up litter. The biggies were tasked with covering the surrounds of the school and the play park.

Despite the weather we got wrapped up, put on hi vis vests and protective gloves and go busy.

After we got back to class we estimated our weights and weighed our rubbish.

All natural insect sculptures: Banton Beasties

We were inspired by A garden alive with art: all-natural insect sculptures to make our own bugs:

Autumn Poems

The Biggies took advantage of the good weather to take some photos in the playground this morning. We then wrote poems to go with them.

Playground trees

This morning we were finding out about the trees in our playground.

We measured the height of trees with our clinometers.
We measured the circumferences of the trees and used a webpage to estimate how old the trees were.
We took photos of the trees, their leaves, bark and fruit.

Skills: maths skills: measuring, calculation to find out the heights. Team work. Taking pictures. Web browsing.

Walk to Dows woods

Yesterday we were at Dow’s woods. Mr and Mrs Carter came in so we could go down to look at insects.

He told us what three ways a seed can spread. The first way is when the wind carry’s it away like the rose berry willow herb. The second way is an animal a squirrel can eat a seed and poop it out or burry and forget about it. The last way it pops like the gorse bush. In the spring they have yellow flowers and they smell like coconuts, they have black seeds pods that pop open and spread the seeds.

One thing that I really liked was when I saw a caterpillar not just any caterpillar a fuzzy one that looked like it had two eyes on its side but it did not. I found it on a leaf and I scooped it into my tub I did not name it, I released it when we were going to go back to school.

The second thing I found interesting was when we caught a lot of baby toads and we caught a frog at one point, I got to hold one of the baby toads remember to wet your hands first! I let it go and hop it went into the grass!

I really liked looking at all the bug like the spiders, butterflies and the ladybugs. I also really loved seeing the trees my favourite tree we saw was the beech because I like the way the seeds looked.

In conclusion I really liked Dows woods because I like looking at the bugs and nature. I love getting closeups of the insects I think they are interesting. We saw hundreds of mushrooms my favourite one was the Fly Agaric toadstool.