Spirit Dancer

After the Spirit Dancer came to Glaitness for us to learn more about it (you can read about that here), some people were very keen to go out paddling in her. Over a quarter of the class, and both the teachers, went out paddling with the Canadians in Spirit Dancer. It was great fun!

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.

Canadian Day part 2 - parcel & party

For the 2nd part of our Canadian Day we had a nice surprise. When we got back into school after break we found that a parcel had arrived from our link school, Outma Sqilx Cultural School in Penticton in the Okanagan Region of British Columbia. We were really excited!

We took turns taking things out of the parcel. There were lots of things and everyone got some hockey cards, a bookmark and a a flag to take home. The other things are staying in school so other people can see them. There's a toy black bear (there are black bears living near our link school) and some pictures of Penticton and the Okanagan Lakes.

They have a monster in the Okanagan Lake called Ogopopo. It looks a bit like Nessie, the Loch Ness monster from Scotland. We wonder if they're cousins?

There were lovely letters from the pupils too, telling us about what they do and about some of the wildlife they see.

They sent us a big Canadian flag, and small flags for everyone too.

We got the big maple leaf flag put up on the flagpole outside the school. It looked really good - especially with the Spirit Dancer Canadian canoe sitting there too!

Lim Limpt, Outma School!

Last thing in the afternoon Mrs MacNab had another Canadian surprise for us. We had a Candian party! We listened to some canoe family songs and videos and then we had ice cream, waffles and maple syrup (which came from Canada - there is even a maple leaf on the Canadian flag).

Yum yum!

After that, Mrs MacNab told us about the Kwu'sukwna?qinx Canoe Family and the giveaway they did when they left Orkney. They gave presents that were either useful or meant something special. Mrs MacNab played the Kwu'sukwna?qinx Giveaway song and we tried to join in with it, then we all got presents.

Do you think we liked them?

We LOVED our Canadian Day!

Canadian Day part 1 - Pipes & salutes in the Spirit Dancer

For the first part of our Canadian Day the Spirit Dancer Canadian canoe came to school to visit us. Some Candians - Chris, Barbara and Bob - came too to tell us all about it. It's 42 feet long - that's nearly 13 metres long!

We all climbed in and were given paddles to hold.

Chris showed us how we would paddle the canoe - and also how to do a salute.

Mrs MacNab was in the skipper's seat.

James from P7 came out and played the pipes for us. We really enjoyed it - and so did the Canadians!

Here's a video of James entertaining us.

Lots of other classes came out to watch and enjoy the music. We showed them how to salute. We were very proud that we were the only class who were allowed to sit in the canoe because of our special link with Canada.

We think some people could happily have stayed in Spirit Dancer all day ...

... but we eventually went inside and asked Chris some questions about canoeing.

Lots of people are hoping to go paddling in the Spirit Dancer in the evening. Will you go?

Digging up our time capsule

Way back on the 1st day of the 1st term in August, we made time capsules. You can read about it here.  This week it was time to dig them up!

Mrs MacNab tricked us - she wrote on the daily plan 'problem solving' and made us think we were doing maths! She gave us clues and told us we had to work together to solve the problem. When we realised it would lead us to the time capsule we got excited. Mrs MacNab said the noise level in the room kept getting higher and higher as we kept getting more and more excited!

Some people tried to get everyone to work together but it was difficult at first as everyone kept shouting out where they thought the time capsule was. Eventually the Mollys worked out how to solve some of the clues and James and Amy got people to take turns, and we quickly solved all the clues.

We headed out to the courtyard  and Kaitlyn showed us what pansies looked like. It didn't take us long to find them!

Then we had to solve another problem - how to dig up the time capsule without making a huge mess and killing the plants. Luckily the people in the gardening club knew where things were stored so we had the right equipment.

Back in the classroom we chose someone to open the parcel and then we all got our own time capsules to open.

It was very exciting. We couldn't believe how much we had changed! Even our writing had changed - at the start of P3/4 we didn't do joined writing and some people found it very hard to read their own writing from the start of the year.

Everyone had grown too! Look at how much taller some of us now - and how much bigger our hands and feet are.

Here's a short video of us digging up and opening the time capsules.

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.