Well this is the last post from the Skeld Primary School Blog. We close our doors for the last time today.
All of the children, staff and parents want to say thank you to everyone who has supported the school over the years.
We have made sure that this final week has been full of laughter and joy and sincerely hope that all of the children remember their final week here as such.
We had a staff/parent and pupil/ex pupil football match after the end of the school day. Final score 9:2 to the adults.
We have had a great day exploring Lerwick. The weather certainly improved over the day. We have explored the Sound Battery as well as had some yummy food in Isleburgh and Fjara. We are now chilling out before bed. It has certainly been a busy day!
Yesterday we had a super day in Sumburgh. We started off enjoying the sunshine at West Voe beach.
We then headed to the Fire Station at Sumburgh Airport. We were shown around and got to see inside the fire station, fire engine, try on PPE and practise using the branch at the end of the hose (luckily we had our jackets on)!
Next up was a visit to the Airport control tower! It was amazing to watch planes and helicopters take off from here and learn how everyone works as a team to keep people safe.
Last up was a visit to the Coastguards. We saw their giant maps of Shetland and Orkney before heading to see their helicopter! There were lots of smiles as we got to go inside to see how the coastguards operate the winch, the cockpit and the medical equipment on board. The big finale was getting winched into the helicopter, we all got a shot – even Miss Barradas!
Thank you very, very much to everyone who let us visit and took the time to share information about their jobs with us. Safe to say we had some very happy bairns (and adults)!
We have been doing further work on Electricity and after discussing electrical safety we wanted to find out how the power came into the school. We went and found the power pole that had the school transformer on it then worked out where it would come into the building. Evidently the boiler house, it then went to the main fuse box in the cupboard in the corridor.
We dismantled lots of things! We just forgot to photograph them!
Mr. Renwick brought us a switch and electric cable from home so we could see what they looked like – we took the switch apart too!
We looked at what the inside of a plug and wall socket to see what they looked like. We opened up some electrical cable to see what the wires were like. We found out that most cables in our houses are made of copper, but that silver is the best conductor of electricity. We use copper as it is cheaper. After taking apart an old power cable from a laptop we found that it was made of braided steel wire.
We made lots of circuits too, here we are testing our fans.
We noticed an odd optical illusion. All three fans are spinning, one is invisible, one is a blur and the third looks like it is moving really slowly.
There was lots of investigative science . We wondered what would happen to a light bulb with a really long and short wire. We thought the short wired one would light up first (spoiler alert – we were wrong) we were amazed to see that it didn’t make a difference. the 3 metre wire and 0.3 metre wire lit up the bulb at exactly the same time.
We then wondered how long a wire would light a bulb from a battery. 3 metres worked… so what about 20 metres? Absolutely no problem at all! (Don’t worry about the table on its side.. it is being used for a STEM project!)
We are very lucky to have Yanan coming in to teach us Mandarin.
She is here in person for one session in four and then the rest of the time we work with her via Teams.
We are learning so much from her so a big thank you goes out to the Confucius Classroom Programme for giving us Yanan and to Mr. Lawson for organising everything on Shetland.
So it is that time of year when we go a little Viking. This year we made some shields and axes. We had to use archaeological research to find ideas for axes, shields and helmets.
In the end we decided on just a shield and an axe, even though we did find some super, cool examples of helmets that have been excavated over the years.
In our research we found that shields could be covered in either linen or leather. They could be decorated so most of us went for this.
A Viking shield was made of wood and had a single hand grip in the middle. The shield boss was made of metal and protected the hand. Most of the original shields found had small holes all around the edge where a leather or rawhide edging was sewn on. You can see our edging on the shields – we didn’t sew it on though!
The most Viking shields ever found at one time were on the Gokstad ship burial where they dug up 64 complete shields. These were painted black and red.
We wanted to check on the tree outside the classroom. Unfortunately after many years of surviving the Winter storms it has been blown over a bit. Mr Renwick is going to check with the Amenity trust to see if it can be saved. While we were out there we took the opportunity to have hot chocolate.
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