Cuddly Caterpillars

 

Last week we welcomed the arrival of some cuddly caterpillars!  They arrived in a little tub with some food.  They are growing like mad!  Over the next week they will get even bigger and will eventually make a chrysalis.  When this happens we will transfer them to their lovely ‘butterfly garden’!  Keep checking back for photos of their progress.    

Tiny Tadpoles to Fast Froglets

As you can see our tadpoles are growing like mad!  They are getting bigger and are zooming around the tank.  We’ve put in a big stone so that when the begin to get legs they can get out of the water and onto the stone!  We are hoping to release them into the pond soon! 

A busy fortnight

We’ve had a busy couple of weeks in Primary 5!  On Wednesday 29^th April Lindsey Taylor from RSPB came in and helped us to do a Bioblitz around our school playground.  We counted the different types of wildlife we saw and found and recorded them on our results sheet.  We were quite amazed at how many different types of wildlife there was in our playground alone.  We are now going to work on cleaning and developing the pond area as part of our conservation topic. 

On Wednesday we donned our wellies and headed out to start cleaning the pond area.  We took most of the duck weed off the top of the water, checked for any litter and removed some of the overgrown grass from the pond too.  We made sure we placed any vegetation on the side of the pond so that any pond creatures can crawl back into the pond.  The pond is already looking much clearer and it will hopefully be ready for our tadpoles soon. 

On Thursday we had some special visitors to our classroom!  Eileen and her Dad took in her pet rabbits to show us.  They were very cute and cuddly!  We enjoyed holding them and watching them in their carry box.  It was interesting to hear about how Eileen cares for them and how much responsibility it is. We were very lucky to be part of the baby rabbits naming and were delighted to meet ‘Strawberries’ and ‘Cream’ along with ‘Waffles’!  Thank you very much to Eileen and her Dad for taking them in to let us see. 

Golfing and Growing!

Today we have taken advantage of the better weather!  We had our second, and last, session of Club Golf today.  We were learning about putting and chipping.  As it was so nice we did some of our putting outside!  We had to make sure our feet were in the right position before hitting the ball – we know to take a step back then out to the side.  We had to try and score points but putting the ball onto a sticky score board.  It was great fun!  There is an open day at the Stromness Golf Club this Saturday 2^nd May – it is free to go along and get a taste of golfing!  They even have some clubs for you to practice with!

Finally this afternoon we planted some seeds in the raised bed outside our classroom.  We planted Poppy, Vetch and Butterfly Mix seeds.  We are hoping that these will attract butterflies and bees.  We are going to hatch some butterflies in our classroom so decided we needed to provide them with a habitat of wild flowers to attract them back!  We turned the soil and added some compost to it.  Then we sprinkled the seeds and watered it to help the seeds to grow.  We have also planted some in small pots in our classroom and will plant them when the seedlings are a bit bigger. 

Just Another Manic Monday!

We’ve kicked our week off in P5 with a ‘Manic Monday’! 

First of all today we had a ‘taster’ session of some Russian.  Mrs Carr came in to talk to us about Russia and give us an introduction to the language.  It was great fun!  We saw some Russian memorabilia, heard about famous Russians, looked at the Russian alphabet and had a go at speaking in Russian. 

Then we had our second session of Tag Rugby.  Unfortunately it was a bit too snowy to try and play on the 3G pitch so we played in the hall instead.  We are really developing our rugby skills.  Tom, the local rugby development officer, is really impressed at the progress we have made in just two sessions.  We are looking forward to using our skills at the local Tag Rugby festival on Friday!

Finally today we took part in a worldwide ‘Puffin Virtually Live’ Event.  Jeff Kinney was being interviewed and releasing the title and cover of his new book.  As we are all Wimpy Kid Fans at SPS, P6 and P7 joined us to watch it.  We heard about Jeff Kinney’s favourite parts in each of his books and got to see the brand new cover first.

 

Rugby, Relics and Rubish

We have had a busy week in P5.  We started a block of Tag Rugby on Monday.  It was lovely and sunny – perfect conditions for playing Rugby!  We got the chance to revisit our skills we have learned before at Tag Rugby in preparation for the Tag Rugby Festival on Friday 1^st May.  We enjoyed our session and are looking forward to the next one. 

 

We finished off our Viking Topic this week.  We looked at some artefacts which Sandra from Historic Scotland left for us to see.  We have really enjoyed our topic this term –it’s been very interesting learning all about the Vikings and their lives. 

 

 

 

Our new topic this term is ‘Orkney Wildlife’.  We are going to learn about some of the common wildlife in Orkney and what we can do to preserve their environment.  As part of this we ‘Bagged the Bruck’ on the shoreline in the front of the school.  We found all kinds of things including gloves, cans and even a hard hat!  It was easy to find the big pieces of bruck but what we needed to do was pick up the really tiny pieces of plastic which birds and fish and other wildlife might try to eat.  We managed to gather 7 bags of bruck from quite a small piece of the shoreline.  It made us think a lot about not littering the environment.

 

 

Back with a Bang!

Welcome back to Term 4!  We are straight into our learning with a bang!  We’ve been doing some information handling in maths this week.  We’ve been asking each other questions and recording the information in a table using tally marks and then converting them to frequencies!  It’s been great fun.  We’ve learned about the different kinds of questions we can ask and how the answers we get determine what kind of table we need to make. 

 

We also had a music lesson in our own classroom this week!  Miss Shearer showed us a clip from Tom and Jerry but we couldn’t hear the soundtrack.  We had to go and create our own soundtrack using instruments from the music room.  We listened to each groups’ soundtracks and then we heard the real one.  It was interesting to hear where we had used similar sounds to the original! 

 

 

Finally this week we had a new addition to our classroom – tadpoles! Our topic this term is going to be Orkney Wildlife so tadpoles will be a great opportunity to learn about some wildlife right on our doorstep!  They are still spawn at the moment but we think by Monday most of them will have hatched!  We will keep you updated on their progress!