Tag Archives: Outdoor learning

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.

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 Week 6

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What a lovely end to a busy week.

As a recognition of good behaviour , we had planned to play hide and seek in the forest. We couldn’t have had better weather for it, or more fun. Ms Scanlan managed to catch everyone, except for Koll. It wasn’t as easy as we thought, some of the P7s are excellent at hiding!

Just before that we planted a few more trees and we saw lots more frogs again. The pond has filled up with water from all the recent rain.

This week to link with our biodiversity life cycles topic, we made a display in French of the Hungry caterpillar – ‘La chenille qui fait des trous’. Ms Scanlan was very impressed by all the French accents and the lovely drawings.

Have a good weekend everyone.

RSPB Schools Birdwatch

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Today Glen Tyler came to help us to complete the annual school grounds survey. We went out in four groups during the morning. We walked around the school grounds and then recorded what we had seen and submitted the results online. We also looked at last year’s results for the UK and Scotland. They were slightly different.

We saw house sparrows, starlings, a blackbird, herring gull and two mallard!

John Muir Day 2

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On Friday 1st November, we had a great day exploring Kergord forest. Pete and John picked us up in minibuses and gave us waterproof clothes and rucksacks. We ran up across the field and into the woods. The first thing that we did was to sit still and listen to all the sounds around us.

After that John led us in a snake, under, over,  along and across the wood. We walked across the stream on logs and climbed up and through trees.

We went up to the house to have our lunch and then spend a while in groups making dens.

We went back up to the house to find out about fire making and then looked at everyone’s dens on the way down.

We really enjoyed all the activities and everyone put 100% effort into the day 🙂