Awards

At the end of term everyone in the class received 2 awards. Some people are missing from the photographs, but we all got our John Muir Discover Award and also a Dolphin Diploma from the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS).

Here are some of the class with their John Muir Awards.

We spent the whole of the 4th term working towards the John Muir Award. There were 4 parts of the award - Discover, Explore, Conserve and Share. To get the award we had to Discover, Explore, Share and Conserve a local place. We chose to do this as part of our coasts topic and visited Scapa and Birsay beaches. We learned about the plants and animals that live there and shared the information with people at the class assembly, by making PowerPoints and on the blog. We helped look after (conserve) our places by doing a Bag the Bruck and by teaching other people about marine litter and why it's important not to have any as it can do a lot of harm and kill wildlife.  We taught them at our class assembly and we also made an animation. We also learned a bit about John Muir who was Scottish but then lived in America and did lots of work to help conserve wild places for everyone to enjoy.

Here are some people with their Dolphin Diplomas. We were awarded them by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

For our awards we had to learn about whales and dolphins (and answer questions about them). We also had to do work to help look after them. We taught people about the dangers of marine litter and we also adopted our own dolphin - Rainbow.

Please help wildlife and don't drop litter!

We enjoyed working on the awards.

The SPECTACULAR class assembly.

Our class assembly taught people all about the dangers of marine litter and how it could damage humans and wildlife. It also taught people about keeping safe at sea. We heard it described as AWESOME and SPECTACULAR afterwards. We were very proud!

We held a raffle at the assembly and raised nearly £200 for the lifeboat. We wrote a song (words and music) and performed it too.

If Mrs MacNab ever works out how to edit the video, she will put it on here! In the meantime, here are some photos from the assembly.

Presenting the money to Mr Cooper from the RNLI.

News from the last week

This blog entry is about the more 'everyday' things that happened in the last week. There will be special blog entries about the rest of the week's events too.

Here we are about to start our coastal food tasting. We've had a food tasting for every topic so we had to have one for the coast too. We were hoping for salmon but we got seaweed instead. Most people didn't like it, though the seaweed biscuits and rice crackers were ok. Only Ashleigh and Ronan liked the seaweed (laverbread from Wales).

We spent a bit of time exploring what was still in the marine chest, before we had to pack it all away to send back to Scottish Netural Heritage for another class to use next.

We finished making our PowerPoint slideshows about the biodiversity of Orkney's coasts, ready to show them at the class assembly. Everyone did very well with making the PowerPoints. Some of the P4s even managed to add sounds and make them run automatically! If you need lessons in how to make a colourful slideshow, just ask P3/4!

 

It was the last week of the gardening club. Can you guess what we were going to be doing?

We did a review of the year. We said what we had liked most, what we had found easy, what we hadn't enjoyed as much and what we had found difficult.

Somehow, we still found time to do PE. We had fun playing lots of different games.

We went to watch the final of Glaitness has got Talent! We were very proud of the people from our class who had got to the final. It isn't easy to perform in front of the whole school,but they were great!

The P7 band, Unlimited, won the show. The played 'Sweet Home Alabama' and sounded very professional. They really got the audience going. 

Well done, everyone.

Almost the end of term...

We can't believe it's almost the end of the school year already. We'll soon be in P4/5! We met our new teacher this week - it was very exciting because she took us to see some chicks in her classroom. We saw one hatching, and another 2 that were eating food. They were cute.

We're still rehearsing hard for the class assembly.

We've been finding out about how different creatures develop.  We compared orcas, grey seals, bottlenose dolphins and humans.

Did you know that orca calves drink 230 litres of milk a day? We don't think even Reid could manage that!

Did you know that puffins can start having babies when they're only 3 years old?

Did you know that grey seals pups are left to look after themselves when they are only 3 weeks old?

Did you know that female orcas can live to 90 years old?

Did you know that a newborn orca calf puts on weight at rate of 4kg per hour (that’s about 10 tins of baked beans!). By the time a seal pup is 3-4 weeks old it will weigh about 3 times what it weighed when it was born. A human baby will take about a year to weigh about 3 times wat it weighed when it was born.

We found it really interesting that creatures all developed at different rates.

It was exciting at the start of the week because we received some PowerPoints from our link school in Canada. The pupils from Outma Sqilx Cultural School made them to teach us some of their language. It looked really funny and has different letters to English - we had no idea how to say the words but they had added sound files so we could hear them speaking too. Then at the end they gave all the translations.

 

Lim limpt, Outma school!

We've all learned how to say "We are Okanagan" in the Syilx language. Ask any of the pupils and they will teach you too.

We've got some more exciting news about our link with Canada - the Canadian Spirit Dancer canoe is coming to Glaitness to visit us next week. We had a competition to design a piece of artwork to go on the canoe, so that a piece of Orkney will go with the canoe wherever it goes in the world! We're going to paint it on to the canoe soon and will show you more then.

We had fun with parachute games in PE.

Here's the cat trying to catch the mice...

On Friday it was the auditions for "Glaitness Has Got Talent". It was VERY scary performing in front of the whole school. We are very proud that 2 people from our class got through to the final. There are only 8 people in the final, so they did very well. Well done Dani and Kaitlyn!

The final will be next week, so it looks like the last week of term will be another busy and exciting one!

Can you trust information from the internet?

We've learned a lot of interesting things from our coastal Show and Tell this term. Joe did a great talk about lighthouses this week and brought in lighthouse painting and model lighthouse he had made. That made us wonder how many lighthouses there were in Orkney. We looked it up on wikipedia and discovered there were 7 - but we're sure we can name more than 7!

We learned that you can't always trust information on the internet - just like when we looked at the tree octopus website.

We think there are lighthouses at Hoy High (Graemsay), Hoy Low (Graemsay), Westray, Sanday, North Ronaldsay, Copinsay, Brough of Birsay, Cantick Head (Hoy), Auskerry and Shapinsay. That's 10 that we can think of. Have we forgotten any?

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An active week

We've had a very active week, with Walliwall and Sports Day (despite the afternoon races being postponed to next week).

As well as those exciting events we had a visitor this week - Cara came to visit us! She's 10 months old, and we were able to see if our ideas about what a 10 month old baby can do were correct. She was cleverer than we had expected - and mischievious too. She enjoyed playing a game where we took turns at handing her a toy and then she threw it for us to pick up!

We were surprised that she could understand so much - when Mrs MacNab asked Cara for the toy,Cara held it out to her. Here she is with her proud big sister.

We did some problem solving with money. We were very pleased that we worked everything out correctly.

Can you estimate how many groattie buckies are in the bottle? They were all collected on North Ronaldsay.

How many do you think you could find?

We finished making our 'under the sea' corner in the classroom - we're hoping the parents will get to see it after the class assembly (on Tuesday 22nd June). Do you like the jellyfish and sea urchins?

Under the sea is a great place to work.

After sports day afternoon was cancelled, it was raining too hard to go outside to play at lunchtime, so we got the dressing up clothes out......

We had FUN!

We enjoyed taking photos of other people dressed up too.

What would you dress as?

Week 7 - jellyfish and money

We love playing with technic lego in Golden Time. We create lots of different models and machines.

Some people enjoy doing craft in Golden Time. Can you guess what we're making?

We'll put photos on the blog of these when they're finished!

In maths we're still working on money. We're learning about the different coins and notes.

We're practising working out change.

We practise buying things and giving change in the smoothie shop or the P3 and P3/4 shop.

P4 have been problem solving with money. Some of us are very proud of how we did!

We're busy preparing for our class assembly. We've been researching lifeboats ...

... and building our own one.

Mrs MacNab has been really enjoying 'Coastal Show and Tell'. We've had some great things in - like these giant mermaid's purses...

... and Hector the hermit crab!

It's nearly time for the school sports day - so we've been practising. This is our trials for the relay race.

We're hoping we get good weather for sports day.