On Thursday 17th May, Primary 5/6 had a great morning planting up a new area of the school grounds with the Woodlands Trust trees that we received last autumn. The grass was strimmed and John made planting holes to put the saplings into. After a quick demonstration the children soon learnt how to bed the trees in and by break time we had a whole new forest planted up. We can’t wait to see how they grow.
This afternoon Primary 5/6 and some of Primary 6/7 went to visit the dig at Broo. Gerry Bigalow, the project coordinator met us and gave us a really interesting talk all about the house site. Every year they find something different and reveal more of the house. This year they have uncovered a huge fireplace and a window that hasn’t been looked through for 300 years!
After the talk and walk around the site we split into two groups and had a chance to do some real hands on archaeology. We used the large hanging sieve to look through buckets of the sandy earth from the site and it was exciting to see how many things we found. There were lots of bones and some burnt peat.
The second activity was to use the trowels to scrape back the soil and look for artefacts. This time there were again quite a few bones and the remains of a very old bottle.
We were lucky with the weather and really enjoyed the walk there and back too. Primary 5/6 gave the afternoon 10/10!
Thanks to Faith and Robert’s mums for coming with us too.
Today we have been planting seeds for wildlife. We have planted the seeds in containers and then when they have grown we will plant them outside. Every day we will go out to the poly tunnel and check to see how they are growing.
Today we went out to the trees to learn about the different species. We saw a few Shetland bumblebees feeding on the Willow flowers. We also went to look at how our tree saplings are doing, ready to plant in a couple of weeks. They looked great and we got some ideas about where to plant them.
Primary 5/6 were really excited to receive their replies from Lomayana. The cards were beautifully drawn and it was really good to hear all about life in this part of Kenya.
This afternoon we all took part in the RSPB Schools birdwatch. Schools throughout the whole of the UK take part in this and record the birds in their school grounds.
The results are then uploaded to the RSPB and they use the information to look at changes in bird populations.
Local birdwatcher Glen Tyler took groups of children out and we used our school binoculars, that Ness Engineering and Hugh Harrop had given us last year. The children asked lots of questions as they went around the school and used Hugh’s identification guide to learn a bit more about the local birds.
Everyone said they would like to do this again.
Last term the class wrote some fantastic adventure stories. We helped each other to make them better and then spent a lovely afternoon with P1/2 reading our stories to the younger children.
We were really excited today to meet our two new pupils – Typhena and Junias. They had a great time and went up to Mareel with the P6 and 7s in the morning to see Wonder.
Back in school the P5s did a range of crafts, started to design badges for a competition and started to learn Vive le vent – Jingle bells in French.
We had a super afternoon watching the dress rehearsal. It’s looking really good! See you all there tomorrow or Friday!
On Monday our P6s had their final training session. They are all now fully trained up and this is what they said about their training-
Shane: I liked playing games like Giant’s Keys.
Ronan: Playleader was good because we learnt fun games to play with the little ones.
Holly : I think it was very, very good because the games we are playing are so good.
Jessica: Playleader is great for the Primary 2s and 3s, because if they don’t have anyone to play with then they can play with us.
Archie: It’s quite fun, but sometimes the little kids don’t listen very well!
Ryan: Playleader was very good because we got to play good games and played with little ones, but they were hard to control!
Ruby: I liked Playleader because we all did it together and it was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do it with the younger ones.
Thanks to Toby for all the photos.
Primary 5/6 had a really interesting afternoon hearing all about the work of the NAFC from Dr Beth Mouat . She explained why the college had been set up and explained about all the different types of fisheries in Shetland and how important they are to the Shetland economy. She told us about all the data that they collect and the importance of it in terms of environmental and economic sustainability.
We also looked at a display case of different crab species and had to try to age scallops.
