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!

Birsay land art competition - the winners are announced....

We can now reveal the winners of the land art competition which we asked you to vote on here. We were very pleased with the number of votes and all the comments that people added to our blog.

The voting was very close for quite a few days, then the puffin started to pull ahead - and it was declared the eventual winner when the poll closed, with 20 votes out of the total of 47 votes cast.

Here are the winners with their prizes.

Would you like to see us making our land art? Here we are ...

The quad bike looks much better with the drivers on it!

They had to spend a long time searching for the right shapes of stones for the wheels.

The starfish and spiral were both quite big - these photos should give an idea of the size.

Will you make something the next time you go to the beach?

Birsay!

We had a great trip to Birsay, studying the biodiversity of the coast there. We predicted that we would find different things to Scapa - and we were right. We didn't expect to find so many hermit crabs though - we found over 50 in one rockpool!

We did a Bag the Bruck. The beach looked clean but we still managed to find 52 pieces of bruck in 5 minutes!

How many different types of seaweed can you find?

Can you name them all?

Here's some pictures of the fun we had rockpooling.

Mrs MacNab paddled into a rockpool to photograph this sea anemone with the waterproof camera ...

... and her feet got wet! She had a hole in her wellies!

We had a great time.

The sun even came out and there was lots of blue sky.

The hermit crab in the pink top shell was most people's favourite.

This is the hermit crab that nipped Mrs MacNab!

We found lotd of interesting things like crabs, goose barnacles and sea hares.

We love rockpooling!