Shetland – P3A 2024

May 15, 2025

Birdwatching at the Sands of Sound

As part of our Shetland topic, we have been learning about birds that we might find in Shetland and their proper names and Shetland names.

We went to the beach and listened carefully for the tirricks. There were two that were swooping about, people were on the island and disturbing their peace. Some of us saw a duck on water as well.

The class are desperate to see and hear a puffin but there was none to be seen. We have looked on the puffin cam at Sumburgh head and saw ones there.

Meta-skills used today were: focusing and curiosity.

April 30, 2025

Da Magic Stane

We did some classwork on labelling key places on the Shetland map. We then listened to the Shetland dialect poem ‘Da Magic Stane’.

Da Magic Stane :: Shetland ForWirds

After that we went out into the playground to look at the map on the ground. Mrs Abernethy and some pupils wrote the names of the islands on the map. We took our stone we got from the beach last week and placed it on our chosen island. We then wrote an imaginative story about what our own magic stone would do and where it would go. Some went to Bressay, some went to Whalsay and some went to capybara island.

We had a Shetland map jigsaw to do when finished. There are only 9 pieces but it is surprisingly tricky.

Meta-skills included are: focusing, initiative, communicating, leading, collaborating, sense-making and critical thinking

April 25, 2025April 25, 2025

Trip to the Beach

What a sunny day!

Off to the beach we went to skim some stones. We each took a stone back to class to be our magic stone for a lesson next week. We will be listening to ‘Da Magic Stane’ and using this as an idea for our writing focus.

Here is a link to the poem if anyone hasn’t heard of it.

Da Magic Stane :: Shetland ForWirds

Harry was our star skimmer today! He has an amazing technique.

Meta-skills included in this learning opportunity included: focusing, adapting, initiative, communicating, collaborating, leading and critical thinking.

April 23, 2025April 23, 2025

Maps of Sound

We looked at our local area today and used a map to find various locations around the school. The children loved going out and about with the clipboards and finding the 9 locations. We then had to look on the map and find it there too, this was a lot trickier but the pupils were map experts by the end of the lesson.

Meta-skills used during the lesson were: focusing, communicating, sense-making and critical thinking.

We are going to move on to looking at maps of the whole of Lerwick later on in the week and then we will look at the map of Shetland next week.

Shetland is our topic for this term. If anyone has any skills or talents that they would like to share with us to support the class to learn about Shetland then please get in touch.