Today as part of our Rainforest topic primary 6 visited the woodland area beside the canal to begin comparing the Scottish landscape with the tropical rainforests. We are so excited about this topic, we’ve planned lots of wonderful activities. The thing we want to know most about is the tribes!
Article 29
You have the right to education which develops your personality, respect for other’s rights and the environment
To end our wonderful rainforest topic primary 5 embarked on a wonderful adventure to Amazonia before the Easter holidays. Amazonia is Scotland’s largest indoor tropical rainforest and home to many amazing and rare animals. We could feel the humidity and heat the minute we entered the building! We viewed and handled many different creatures and had an amazing experience! Here are some of our thoughts on the day…
‘We saw monkeys, spiders, snakes, birds and butterflies. It smelled really funny! We went into a room to hold animals, I held a fat tailed gecko, I shook hands with a tarantula and had a snake around my neck! We played a game where you stand in front of a special green screen and it looks like you are in the actual rainforest! It was a brilliant day!’ Erin L
“I loved holding the animals, but was a bit scared that they were going to jump up on me!” Murray
‘I really enjoyed Amazonia. The best bit was seeing all the nocturnal animals. I had the snake around my neck but it was scary holding the spider because I am scared of them but I still did it!’ Lewis B
“When the Kinkajou ran over our heads in the dark room, I got a really big fright, because we couldn’t see it!” Jasmine
A big thank you to our helpers Mrs Buchanan and Mrs King for coming on our trip!
Article 28
You have the right to education
While we were learning about the rainforest, we discovered that some of the non-fiction books we were using for research did not have all the information in them that we needed, so Primary 5 were set a challenge to create our very own non-fiction books. The books had to have an eye-catching title and front cover, had to contain a contents page, a fun page, a glossary and at least four chapters.
Over the holidays, Mrs Buchanan-Coutts and Miss King looked over them, giving us a grade and a certificate that depended on how well we met the success criteria. Our teachers thought that some of us put in a tremendous amount of effort and really pushed ourselves to go above and beyond our targets and those people received an additional special prize, so well done to Sara, Murray, Jonathan, Hannah, Neive and Marco.
If the authors agree, any gold certificated books will be put into the topic box library for future use by other children in our school.
Last week LUSH from Livingston Centre visited the St Nicholas to talk to primary 5 about how they source ingredients for their products fairly and in a way that protects the environment. It was very interesting and we all learned a lot about fair trade and about rare ingredients from all over the world!
We were particularly concerned about the use of palm oil in products after our presentation from Joss, Hannah S and Georgia. Luckily LUSH never use palm oil in any of their products.
After their presentation LUSH set up a stall for everyone to buy gifts for their Mum’s for Mother’s Day on Sunday! There were hand creams, bath bombs, bath jellies and soap bars on offer, the upper area smelled wonderful all day.
There was lots of discussion and mental maths in action as boys and girls from across the school helped each other work out how much they could buy with the money they had and how much change they would receive.
By Hannah S, Georgia and Joss
We have been speaking to the P5 classes about what palm oil is and how using it is damaging to the rainforest because people are tearing down all the trees to get it.
Palm oil comes from trees that have been cut down to be used for different products of food and for petrols.
It is important that people know about palm oil because using it is leading to deforestation of the rainforest. We learned that if we don’t stop cutting down trees the rainforests could all be gone by 2030 when we are 25 years old! It would be sad if our grandchildren would not be able to learn about the rainforest when they are at school and see how the tribes of the rainforest live, or the great plants and animals.
You should try and reduce the amount of palm oil that you eat but we are not saying not to eat anything with palm oil in it just try not to eat lots of it. We are trying to tell everyone so that we can help to save the rainforest!
At the weekend we went to the shop Lush in Livingston Centre and we told the shop assistant about our rainforest topic, she told us all about the products they make that have no palm oil. One product that has palm oil in it is toothpaste but Lush sells something called Toothy Tabs which are like minty sweets you crush and then you brush your teeth (like a mini bathbomb in your mouth!) Toothy Tabs have no palm oil. We told the class we had a surprise for them and they had to bring in their tooth brushes, at the end of our talk we gave everyone a Toothy Tab to try!
This week primary five have had great fun learning about different foods that have come from the rainforest… BLINDFOLDED!
We were amazed that Miss King and Mrs Buchanan-Coutts didn’t have to travel to South America at the weekend and they managed to find all these exotic foods in Asda! We were able to tell from the pacakaging exactly where each item had come from… Peru, Columbia, Brazil! Some of the fruits included mango, banana, pineapple, grapefruit, sharon fruit, coconut, physilis.
Everyone had a shot at being blindfolded and had to say what the food smelled like, felt like and most importantly tasted like! Then we all tried some. It was great fun especially when we were pretending they were spiders or bugs and we were on a rainforest gameshow! We tried to capture some reactions with the camera!
Well done to all the boys and girls, they all had a go and tried most of the foods! Some people even tried foods they thought they didn’t like and changed their minds!
We are going to choose our favourite of all the foods we tried and present our findings in charts, graphs and tables during our maths next week. Which of the foods do you think will be the most popular?
Primary 5A have been doing amazing projects. Mrs Buchanan-Coutts wanted us to show her, by thinking outside the box, a creative way to show that we understand the food chain. We were allowed to be as creative as we liked. We were given a whole week to do this task, and we’ve had some outstanding work from some of the Primary 5 students this week!
We came up with some extraodinary ideas like powerpoints, posters, puzzles, mood boards and boxes decorated about the food chain. Some of the class used lego, Minecraft and even clay models to show their understanding.
Mrs Buchanan-Coutts was very impressed with some of the unusual ideas we came up with and we all had great fun doing it into the bargain. Written by P5a.
Primary 5b have been learning all about the different types of animals that can be found in the rainforest! We learned about vertebrates and invertebrates, then we started to classify different animals into categories; mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians!
Last week we were set the homework challenge to ‘show animals that are mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians in ANY WAY!’ Miss King wanted us to be as creative as possible! The results were amazing…
Some people created interactive powerpoint presentations full of facts and examples of animals, some people made books, fact files and posters, some people wrote lists or drew tables and some people drew pictures of different animals! Hannah B made some amazing creatures out of modelling clay; we all thought they were so cute! Hannah S made a beautiful mobile using coat hangers, tissue paper and ribbons with the animals pictures attached! Fraser baked 5 cupcakes and decorated them with an animal from each of the five categories! Paige created a rainforest song to the music of ‘We Are the Champions’ by Queen; we all sang along it was fantastic! Terri created her own jigsaw with pictures of animals from each category and we helped her to put it together, what a fantastic idea! Krzysztof used lego to create models and Marco even used his favourite game minecraft to ‘build’ his animals and took pictures of them!
It was amazing to see all the fantastic ideas and creations! Miss King was so proud of us that she invited Mrs Brown and Mrs Deas to visit us and see all our fabulous work… they were VERY impressed!
Primary 5A have become explorers of the deep, dark rainforest. Now that we know where to find rainforests, what the climate is like and what it might look like from within, we have started converting our classroom. It is beginning to take shape, but in order to help us learn about this vast area of amazing land, we have arrived as teams of experts – Ornithologists, Botanists, Mammologists, Herpetologists and Entemologists. Last week we had to research and share information on our specific groups with the rest of the class. Next we will be looking at some of the products that are found in the rainforest, in particular from the plants and we hope the Botanists will help us a bit!
Primary 5b have been learning all about animals of the rainforest!
We worked in pairs of research teams and were given an animal to create a fact file for, all the fact files were to be published in our very own ‘Rainforest Encyclopedia’!
Some of us had animals we had never even heard of like an okapi (which is actually a horse like creature with zebra legs!) or a gaboon viper (which is a deadly snake!), before we started our research another research team set us some questions to find out about our animal, such as; How long does it live for? Is it poisonous? What does it eat?
We went off in our research teams and used the internet and books to find our information. Then we used Mircosoft Word to create eye catching fact files with images and different fonts!
Once our fact files were complete and in the encyclopedia we presented them to our class, some of the facts were amazing… Did you know a blue morpho butterfly has a lifespan of only 115 days? The harpy eagle has a wingspan of over 7 foot!
We then provided each other with quality feedback on the presentations, we looked at each others fact files and tried to decide if they had provided enough information or answered all the questions they were asked, then we left comments for the researchers to read! We are hoping our wonderful encyclopedia will be filled with amazing information all about the rainforest as we continue our topic!
Next we are moving on to classifying animals as vertebrates or invertebrates, then mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles!
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