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!

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!