Rescue!

We had an interesting visit from Mr Cooper from the RNLI this week. He talked to us about the lifeboat and answered lots of questions about how the lifeboat works, where the lifeboatmen sleep, what happens when there's an emergency and how quickly they have to get changed when there's a callout.

We pretended we were all on a boat and it started to sink. We had to quickly get lifejackets on - but there weren't enough for everyone....

Some people had very big lifejackets - so they wouldn't be very safe. We learned it was very important to have the right size and to fasten it properly so it would stay on and not go up right over our heads if we were in the water.

This is the same kind of lifejacket that the lifeboat crew wear. It inflates when they go in the water. Do you know what makes it inflate?

It has little silver tubes full of gas inside it. They cost £20 each and have to be replaced each time they are used. So every time the lifeboat crew train it costs lots of money!

When our boat sank we pretended to dial 999 and ask for the coastguard. They set off a pager to get the lifeboat crew. Mr Cooper had to put on his waterproofs very fast and come to save us.

He threw us a liferaft but not everyone could fit into it!

We looked at some different flares which people on boats could use in an emergency to show where they were. We weren't allowed to set any off though.

Last, the lifeboat threw us a rope and towed us to safety.

We had great fun and learned a lot too.

Did you know that the lifeboat crew (there are women as well as men) are all volunteers?

Did you know that the lifeboats are all paid for by donations?

We're going to raise some money for them at our class assembly. We think we can raise enough to pay for some cylinders of gas for the lifejackets for the crew to wear. We hope you can help raise money for them too.

K'nex Challenge!

On Monday we had a K'nex workshop. We were in teams and we had to start by learning how to use K'nex (although some people had used it before). First we made squares and then cubes.

When we helped each other we could build things much faster!

Then we were given a challenge. We had to design and build a car which would carry someone's shoe down a ramp and across the floor - without the shoe falling off. Everyone had lots of different ways of fastening the shoes and the finished cars were very different in design - but they all met the challenge successfully.

Before we tested the cars we had to show them to everyone and say what they were called, how much they cost to build, and a problem we had when we were making it and how we solved it.

Here is the winning car with its designers. It went almost right across the room.

Here is a slideshow of lot more photos from the challenge.

 

The teachers had their own K'nex challenge after school. They had to build a bridge following a picture in a book and then then had to design and make playground equipment.

 

What do you think of their models?

Make a Difference Day

Wednesday 19th May was Glaitness School's 5th Make a Difference Day. Events were held around the theme of biodiversity. Here's our report about the day.



For MADD5 we made bionimals. They were made out of things you find in nature. We had to hand them in for a competition. They were all very good.

Here is Jessica's bionimal. It won a prize!

Here is a slideshow of photos of the other bionimals made by class 3/4.





In the hall we looked at everyone’s bionimals. Some of us played a game about road safety. We got leaflets, bookmarks and stickers for walk to school week.

There was a quiz about compost. There were 10 bags with things in them and you had to say if you could put them in a compost bin or not. You could lift up a piece of paper to see the answers. Did you know that you could put oranges and cardboard in your compost bin?

There were footsteps with questions and you had to write answers on stickies. There was a reading corner with lots of books about growing plants and things.

We built bird’s nests with grass, sticks, feathers and paper and then we put a toy bird in it. There were whistles made out of wood. James did tons of impressions – he even managed to make it sound like a cow and a horse!

In the middle of the hall you could make pictures out of nature. There were sticks, stones, leaves, flowers, feathers, pine cones, seeds and beach grit. There were lots of good pictures.

There were hoops to sort different animals into. We put stickies onto bees to show the parts.

We made fortune tellers and took them to Muddisdale and used them to help us know what to find, like different shapes of leaves and leaves that have been eaten.

Here is a slideshow of photos from the Make a Difference Day event in the hall.





Muddisdale was cool! We found lots of green beetles on docken leaves and we found a juicy, green caterpillar but we didn’t eat it. Birds would like to eat it though.

Mrs Rendall had a big white sheet and we did a tree shake to see what fell off then we put the things we found in a little jar to magnify it. We found little orange eggs on the docken leaves and we found out they were the little green bettles’ eggs. We put them in the magnifier and then we put them back into their habitat.

Lee’s Dad came and took our picture and it might be in the newspaper next week.

We did the Great Plant Hunt for Kew gardens and we also all had to find something which began with the same letter as our name. Some were really hard - like J and K!

We found out we shouldn’t pick the flowers because then there won’t be new flowers so it is important for biodiversity that we look after our plants and animals and trees.

Here is a slideshow of photos from the walk to Muddisdale.

Almost half way through the term.

We spent some time researching lifeboats this week. We need this information for our class assembly. We found out that there are 3 lifeboats in Orkney - one each in Kirkwall, Stromness and Longhope on Hoy. The Kirkwall lifeboat is a Severn class boat.

 

We've been investigating how sand is formed. We made our own sand from stones and shells. We then looked at it using the microscope. We'll be adding some photos of what the sand looks like in the microscope.

We enjoy practising our spelling using different strategies. Here's 2 of them - back writing and newspaper search. It was quite difficult to find our spelling words in the Orcadian and Orkney Today - but we tried.

Mrs MacNab made some people do money problem solving in maths. It was really hard! We were very pleased when we finally managed to do it! We had to use 2 different problem solving strategies together to work it out.

We did a 'team memory' challenge. It was quite fun, and it's helped us to think about what information is important - and that we don't need to learn the exact words from books, we can just remember the important facts and put them into our own words.

We're still enjoying football. Mrs MacNab is very impressed with how good people are getting at dribbling the ball now, especially the people who had never played football before.

Can you guess what we're making here? It's something that lives in the sea. 

Mrs MacNab was very glad that nobody took a photo of her trying to blow up the balloons!