Tag Archives: Eco-Schools

Week 8

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We have had a lovely week, with a mixture of activities.

Some of our class went on a transition visit to Sandwick Junior High School and they enjoyed the range of activities. Next week they will have their 2 full days at the school.

Everyone has been very busy making in our enterprise project making lots of items for sale next week…watch this space. They made questionnaires too and on Friday did some market research for ideas about prices and designs.

Our drama projects are coming together and we’ll start filming next week.

We were really interested to hear back from family and friends in the Nepal climate change project and we had a great discussion about what changes we thought had occurred over the last few decades – there certainly doesn’t seem to be as much snow in the winters and some of the animals that we see are different.

Thanks to Ellie, we had a really interesting end to the week. She had been given some owl pellets by a relative. Last time we looked at owl pellets we only found mouse and rat remains from the Shetland long eared owls. This time we found lots more prey items – rats, mice, voles and shrews from the Barn owl pellets.

British Council Climate Project with Nepal

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Week 1

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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.

What’s Under Your Feet?

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Primary 7 worked really enthusiastically today on this long term British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) citizen science project.

Over the year we will carry out 3 invertebrate surveys to see what is living in our school grounds. The BTO is collecting information from all over the UK to find out whether the invertebrate numbers and species are changing and whether this has an effect on bird populations.

Today we found worms, slugs, beetles and a few other invertebrates. We didn’t find as many as we thought that we would. It will be interesting to see what we find in March and June.

End of Term 1

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What a busy week we have had again. Finishing off all our owl pellet work. We have also been finding out about more food chains and webs, planting more trees, drawing and painting barn owls and finally listening to a fantastic performance in the hall this afternoon.

What a lovely term we have had and what a great class the P7s are.

Have a great holiday 🙂

Owl Pellets

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This week we have been finding out about food chains and food webs.

Today Ms Scanlan brought in some long-eared owl pellets that had been found in Shetland. We spent the afternoon taking them apart and seeing what the owls had been eating. There were lots of bones in there and we could identify mice and rats by the jaw bones and teeth that we found. Everyone worked really hard and concentrated so well on what they were finding. It was really interesting.

Sonic rescue!

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Ms Scanlan had rescued a hedgehog at the weekend and brought it into class to show everyone. We had a really good look at it and then released it into the tree area, so that it can find a safe place to hibernate for the winter. This morning Robbie told us that he had checked on Sonic and it had moved away from where we left it and hopefully is now snuggled up in a little nest.

We did some research about hedgehogs and found out some interesting facts about them and also did some French about Le herrison!

Lois took some great photos for us, thank you.