Nethy Day 2

Another day of glorious weather and the groups split up to do the climbing wall and abseiling at the big tree. The new climbing wall is fantastic! A few warm up games and everyone had a free climbing challenge before attaching harnesses, and climbing up and abseiling down.

Can you get all the way round without touching the floor?

Belaying team.

 The other climbing activity was at the big tree.

Climbing up one side and abseiling down the other.

Claire goes up...

and Claire comes down!

I did it!

After lunch it was time to get kit organised for dry-slope skiing.

Height and weight needs to be measured and boots, helmets and skiis adjusted - lots of mental maths involved for the instructors, and Miss Gillies.

 The ski slope was bathed in sunshine so it was hot work getting around on the skis, but worth it!

Glaitness Ski Team - ready to go!

Future pros.

Half way up.

Up we go.

 As the afternoon progressed, everyone's skills improved until they were flying down with good control and only the occasional bump!
The button lift helped in the heat.

Getting the hang of the button lift.

We ended our activities with a competitive game of polo - with very relaxed rules...

Later, Time Out and supper.

Day 1 at Nethybridge.

We have had beautiful weather for our first day of activities, which started with orienteering. Based on the front lawn, we used increasingly complex maps to look for locations using photo clues. 

Taking a break on the front lawn.

Off with another photo clue.

Getting the answers checked.

A short break - time to catch up with our Michelle Paver books.

Arriving at the zip wire tower.

Zipping!

Made it!

The adventure course was fun.

Morgan makes it look easy.

Finally time for a shower and a swim before tea, games, Time Out and supper. Phew!

Water polo.

The S Team return to Scapa

Today the Glaitness S Team set off for Scapa again.

This time it was Class 7 and Class 5 who walked to Scapa Beach to remove marine litter.

With the help of some parents we managed to fill 20 bags of various sizes and types of litter and remove dangerous plastics from the beach which might entangle marine creatures or which might be mistaken for food by them. Class 7 were able to tell Class 5 children how plastics don't biodegrade and break down harmlessly - they are around forever, just in smaller and smaller pieces!

Searching the strand lines.

 Along the high tide line we found some larger pieces of plastic debris and countless amount of fragments of nylon and plastic rope. There was also a significant number of dead birds and bird feathers and bones which made us wonder if some of the tangled balls of plastic fibres had already been ingested by birds, killed them and then been left behind after the birds had died and decomposed. Did you know that on average there are 30 pieces of plastic in the stomachs of birds?

Jenni explains her job.

 We met Jenni and Kate who came to tell us about how they check on the biodiversity on the shores around Orkney. Jenni is a marine biologist and she finds out about the variety of living things on the beaches and if pollution is affecting them.

She showed us how they take a sample from a sandy beach like Scapa, where at first it might appear to be nothing living there at all.

First they take a sample by pushing a tube into the sand and lifting out the core.

The sand is sieved in the sea water.

Any living things are left behind.
These are the creatures that the sea birds are poking into the sand to find.

We had a look at the tiny animals in the petri dish.

Sue tells us about some of the natural things we found.

20 bags full! Well done the S Team!!!

Many thanks to the parent helpers and our experts for coming along. Thanks also to the Council Waste Management Services for arranging for our green bags to be taken away!

Watch this space for the installation of our 1100 litre bin!

Mini - Olympics

Over the last few weeks Class 7 have been training for the Olympics - the Class 7 mini-Olympics - with Miss Flett. Finally the day arrived and everyone took part in hurdling, throwing and jumping.

P7 mini- Olympics finished with the relay race.

The medal ceremony took place at whole school assembly.

3rd place went to 'Fish fingers and custard'.

2nd place went to 'The bean team'.

1st place went to the 'Dynamos'.

Well done everyone!

World War 2 Scapa Map

Annotating the map of Scapa at  HQ.

Today Anne Bignall of the Scapa Flow Landscape Partnership came in to tell us about the defences in Scapa Flow during World War 2. We added barrage balloons, anti aircraft guns, lights for spotting aircraft, minefields, undersea communications cables, submarine nets and lots and lots more to our big map of Scapa Flow. We used a de-classified map of Scapa to help us find out where to put everything. Maps with all of this information were top secret in 1940!  Next week we will be visiting the Ness Battery to find out what one of these places was like. We will also be exploring the coast of Scapa Flow from Stromness from aboard the MV Graemsay - that will allow us to se the remains of many of the buildings you cannot see easily from the land.

BBC School Report

We are busy gathering and writing news for our BBC School Report broadcast on March 15th. Please make sure you are tuned to our dedicated blog at BBC School Report at Glaitness 2012.

The Olympics interviewers.

The new swimming pool interviewers.

The marine litter reporting team meet Mr Ian Harcus to find out about the 'Fishing for Litter' project.

How we reflect on our learning

We think it is important to think about the learning we have done and know about the skills we are good at, and which are more challenging for us. We do this by looking at the cloud of labels on the blog and choosing one which we think we have done well. When we click on that skill it creates a list of posts which remind us of activities when we used that skill. Now we can choose an example which we remember and are pleased about doing well. We do this at home with our parents and at school once or twice a term. Its great fun to look back at things we have enjoyed and remember how we felt about them.

When posts are put on the blog we can label them with the most important skills we used in that activity. We can look at the cloud of labels and discuss, choose and agree on the best ones. Most of the skills can be used for many different areas of the curriculum (labels like writing and using mathematical skills aren't used much on the blog but you can see these skills on our wiki literacy and maths pages).

Using the blog labels to review learning.
Thinking about the skills we used and how we like to learn.

We learn in lots of different ways and we all like a different mixture of ways of learning, but most of us agree that model making and real life activities are some of the best ways of learning, some of us prefer drama and role play or debates. In our learning review we think about how we like to learn. This helps Ms Mackay give us choices about how we might be able to do things.

A few of our favourite ways of learning - investigating technology outdoors, planning and conducting experiments,
model making, playing games, creating pictures, organising fund raising, print-making.

All of us do things in and out of school which are important to us and we feel a sense of achievement about. Sometimes this can mean we win a medal or earn a certificate, but sometimes it is a real life skill like cooking a meal for the family or being a class representative on the Pupil Council. We like to share these achievements with our teachers so that they understand about our life outside school and what we are good at!

We do lots of things outside of school which we are proud of!

Read All About It!

Our World War 2 topic we have been creating the front pages of newspapers for the year 1940. We have used a lot of the information we have learned about the Home Front. Many of the campaigns were about recycling and reusing and being more self sufficient, reducing food miles. These are familiar ideas to us today but we have found out that they are not new at all!

The Daily Post

The Eagle Times

The UK Herald

Launching the S TEAM!

 Today we (the S Team) were at Scapa Beach picking up litter or ‘Bagging the Bruck’. It was a very windy day but we picked up various types of materials but the main concern was plastic as, although many people don’t realise it, it does not biodegrade and disappear it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces and it is being found in the human food chain in some parts of the world. Some of the other materials we found included rope, bottle tops, shot gun cartages’ and parcel ties.

Sue Whitworth and Lindsay Taylor (the RSPB field officers) met us at Scapa to tell us a bit about the shells, wildlife, the affects of litter and they were also there to give us a hand with picking up litter. We didn’t only go to Scapa to pick up litter we also went to raise awareness of the amount of litter being dropped not only in Orkney but everywhere around the world, to achieve the second part of our John Muir award and also to collect ‘bruck’ to use in our art work.

We managed to collect 12 bags of rubbish and a huge piece of fish netting - it took the whole team to pull it out of the sand.

By Joanne and Leah

Active health - our pulse rates.

Continuing our exploration of active health, Miss Flett set up some activites for us in the hall, but first we need to stretch! Quite a few of us can share stretches we do for our sports.

Can you stretch like this?

 Then we got our pulse rates going!

Finally we took our pulse rates straight away and then compared that with our resting heart rate.

We can tell how fit we are by how quickly our pulse rates get back to normal.

Arctic adaptations

We are continuing to find out about the Arctic and how animals have adapted to deal with the freezing temperatures. This week we investigated how effective blubber is at insulating animals from the cold.

Here we are spreading the lard evenly around the hand of the volunteer inside a plastic bag.

We took the temperature of the hand inside the blubber mitten before it went into the ice water.

The volunteer put their hand inside the mitten into the ice water (1degree C) for 5 minutes.

After 5 minutes the temperature of the hand in the glove had gone up!

Then the volunteers did the same with their other hand without a mitten made of blubber. They lasted for 1.5 minutes and the temperature of their hand dropped from 30 degrees C to 8 degrees C!

Finally everyone wanted to find out what it felt like to put their hand in the ice - water... they lasted for 45 seconds and there was a lot of shrieking!!!!!!!!!

We concluded that 4 inches of blubber would easily keep a polar bear warm in sub zero temperatures.

Why not have a look at some of our Prezi presentations about Arctic food chains on our new wiki project pages!
Here is an example - this is Leah's Prezi: