Month: May 2024

What a glorious day!

We went up the Sound Brae and cut in to the Quoys Burn and walked down it. We took time to listen to the relaxing sounds, to smell the amazing variety of smells and to really look around at all the different colours and things we could see. It was very chilled out. It is a private garden so we had to be respectful and use quiet voices, this helped add to the excitement of it all.

Then we went to the playpark and the bairns had some crazy time running around! After a little play we walked down to the road and saw where the water goes under the road. We took time to blow dandelion clocks. We followed the burn down to the stoney beach and talked about where the water started and where it ended up.

A big point that I made to the pupils is that they should always have a grown up with them when visiting the beach or the burn as playing beside the water can be dangerous. 

Our outdoor learning sessions we cover a lot of areas of the curriculum and give experiences to the children that are just not the same as learning in the classroom.

We have been looking at Meta-skills at Sound School. Some of the Meta-skills that this walk included are:

• focusing
• communication
• collaborating
• feeling
• curiosity
• sense-making
• critical thinking

One of our school values for this term is happiness. There were certainly a lot of happy bairns today.

We have been collaborating in experiments on different ways of producing sound from vibrations, we looked at how to change the pitch of sound. We used cups on string as phones to talk to each other and made harmonicas using elastic bands, straws and lollipop sticks. It was tricky to get the vibrations right to make the sound.

We went on a trip to the stoney beach.

The children highlighted the benefits of outdoor learning:

• You can find things.
• Enjoying being outside and being able to skip and run around.
• You can find a lot of stuff in the sea and can play with what you find.
• You can explore the different areas including the rock pools and paddle in the water.
• Exercise while walking there and back.
• We  saw lots of animals including sheep.
• We saw some dead animals including the whale, sheep and crabs.
• We saw a sea anemone and a star fish.
• We had to balance and be careful when walking over the rocks.
• We shared what we found with each other and the other class.