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British Council Climate Project with Nepal

This week P7 will be bringing home a survey to help them to start their Climate Project. They will be asking long term residents of Shetland questions about environmental and biodiversity changes here over the last few decades. It will be really interesting to hear what they find out. The project information is below. Thank you for your help.

P7 and P6/7 (from August) are taking part in a collaborative project ‘Pairing Communities in Scotland and Nepal to tackle climate change’. This project that has been funded by the British Council. For more information, please look at the following link: https://www.britishcouncil.org/arts/culture-development/our-stories/creative-commissions

• Collaborators: University of Edinburgh (Scotland), Tribhuvan University (Nepal), Teach for Nepal, Midlothian Council (Scotland)
• Climate change theme: Biodiversity; Air pollution
Synopsis
This project will partner school children in Nepal – a country truly impacted by climate change but not as developed in terms of green behaviours, with communities in Scotland – a country dedicated to taking measures but not as obviously affected. Through the collaboration, school children from ten schools in each country will perform parallel environmental measurement experiments and share stories, actions and findings. The children will share experiences through video pen pal exchanges to explore which of their interventions are most successful and to learn more about each other’s climates.
Experiments and pupil-led field research will include testing air and water pollution levels, litter analysis and measuring CO2 levels, temperature and rainfall – working with older pupils to assemble and programme weather stations. The findings of their experiments will be used as the foundation for school and wider community level eco-committees to take action specific to the environmental issues most prevalent in their area.
The eco-communities across Scotland and Nepal will share their successes and challenges with the ultimate aim of finding the most innovative solutions – supported through the establishment of an annual prize. Pupils will also create artworks promoting sustainable messages and will work alongside comic artists, produce blogs and journalistic reports.

Our John Muir Days

This Wednesday and Thursday we went on two John Muir days. The class went in two groups but both groups went to Garth’s Ness.

Ellie: I really enjoyed my John Muir day on Wednesday. My favourite bit was when we all crawled through a tunnel in the rocks. I really really want to go again!

Kayla: I loved the John Muir day. My favourite bit was after lunch when we were playing on the boulders and making out the floor is lava courses. I would love to go again!

Matthew: I loved the John Muir day so much, especially when I got to go in a cave! it was my highlight of my week. I would love to go again.

Koll: John Muir day was really fun, my favourite part was when we got to go through the cave. I would really like to go on John Muir again.

Fergus: I really enjoyed John Muir day, everything was very exciting. My favourite part was climbing around at all of the boulders. If I could then I would definitely go on a John Muir trip again!

Tory: One Wednesday I went on my John Muir, it was so fun because we went rock climbing. My favourite part was when we went to the Garth ness eye when Koll and I went through the cave their, I hope we can go on another John Muir soon!

Kelsi: I really enjoyed doing John Muir, it was very fun doing something you wouldn’t normally do and pushing yourself to do it. My favourite part was got to the Garths Ness eye, it was a really beautiful place to go, I hope we will be able to go on another John Muir soon!

Hayden: I loved doing John Muir and going to the caves.

Thinglink Interactive Map

For the first few weeks of term, the Primary 7s have been working hard, finding out about ‘Places that make us happy’ in the South Mainland. They used this learning to make an interactive map and this was shared today during the Shetland Health and Wellbeing week. It has been lovely to hear about everyone’s favourite places, stories and activities.

Please have a look and we hope that you enjoy it.

Here is the link for the finished map. https://www.thinglink.com/scene/1444059753809444865

The introduction and instruction for what to do is on the map.
Click on the white microphone first and it will explain everything.

There are then 5 types of tags
Green – wildlife
White – places
Red – stories
Yellow – history
Blue – activities.

If you click on a tag the audio will come up. There are also photos / written descriptions and most of the tags have a video link at the bottom of the script.

Enjoy 🙂

Friday 30th April

It has been another busy week. We have completed our map skills project and on Friday made up our own maps, which we’ll put up on the wall for display. We have been continuing our South Mainland topic (see Hayden’s lovely drawing)and in music Mrs Inkster has been teaching us the Unst boat song, which is sounding really lovely. In drama Izzy Swanson has been working on some south mainland stories with us. We spent all Friday afternoon doing the Voar Redd Up – thank you to Michelle for coming out with us. There was lots of rubbish, especially plastics to collect, but we also found a few mermaid’s purses, a rat (!) and Liam found an enormous sea slater.

Friday 23rd April

We have had another busy and varied week. We have started our ‘Changing Me’ topic and on Friday had a look at the reproductive process in plants. We had drama with Izzy again and we’re finding out about Shetland stories to retell. We have been developing our map skills and this week looked at angles, bearings and coordinates. In our topic we are thinking about ‘Places that make us happy’ and we’ll be presenting all that information soon. In French we are learning how to describe ‘Ma famille’.

Map skills Friday 16th April

We learnt how to use compasses and take bearings today. Then in the afternoon we made our own compasses by magnetising needles and putting them onto cork discs floating in water. They worked really well 😄

Week 1

It has been so lovely to see everyone back for the start of Term 4. We have been really lucky with the weather, so we have been able to have outdoor learning of some sort each day.

We have started our map skills project and have learnt to use scale, read length, use coordinates and directions and bearings.

On Wednesday we started our drama lessons with Izzy Swanson, which was really good fun.

We have been out to the pond area to check on the frogs and tadpoles and went back this afternoon with pond nets. We caught lots of tadpoles, but the exciting catches were several big diving beetles, water boatmen and a huge freshwater shrimp. We’ll go back in a few weeks to see how much it has changed.