We had a really interesting time this week finding out about Nepal and writing answers to their questions for our video call. It was great to meet the children from Mount View school, Balkot, Nepal.
Tag Archives: Science
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.
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 4
The Primary 7s have been doing lots of work on their group presentations. They have all been continued researching and have written their scripts. There are lots of interesting facts that they have been finding out. In French we have been using more adjectives in our writing , describing cats! We have started to think about what we are doing for our Christmas video, we had lots of fun on Thursday starting to film it and coming up with ideas.
Lots of the class have been doing the JRSO daily challenges and we had a very stripy zebra day!
Have a good weekend!
What’s Under Your Feet?
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.
Owl Pellets
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.
Life Cycles
The Primary 7s have been working very hard on their life cycle writing and here are some of their beautiful pieces of writing.
We also had fun this morning looking at the shark, ray and skate egg cases and finding out all about them.
End of Week 6
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.
Primary 7 Assembly
This afternoon Primary 7 did something a little bit different for their assembly / show of learning. They split into four groups to explain about all the things that they were finding out about in Block 1. Each group split into two teams to make display boards and explain all about Pneumatics, Electricity, Enterprise and John Muir. The school split into their Focus Friday groups and parents joined the teams to visit each of the four workshops.
Toby did a fantastic job of timekeeping to keep us all on track, and everyone seemed to find their way from group to group.
After that, Primary 7 played a short piece from the beginning of their Radio Scotland Junior Historians show, that they made in the autumn. And finally Drew played a ‘Thank you for listening’ film that he had made using his drone.
The Primary 7s really enjoyed doing their assembly like this and said that it was a lot more fun and they enjoyed speaking to smaller groups and doing lots of activities. Ms Scanlan was very proud of all of them and hopes that the audience were too. Well done P7s!