Outdoor Learning

During Outdoor Learning last week, we finally managed to go pond dipping!  Conrad took groups of five or six children to the pond, and each group filled several buckets of water, which they took back to the playground to examine more closely.  We found lots of interesting and different types of minibeasts in the pond water.

Thank you, Conrad, for helping us out!

Tag Rugby Festival

Our whole school Tag Rugby festival took place on Friday last week.  Primaries 1 to 3 played their games before break, and the older classes played after break.  Everyone played in their house teams, (Seals, Otters, Beavers and Dolphins) with a Primary 7 pupil acting as captain of each team.

P7 captains gathering their teams at the start of the festival.

Bruce reminded everyone of the rules before the games.

Everyone was very impressed by the standard of play, and by the good sportsmanship shown by the teams. 

Thank you to Bruce and Mark for their help in organising the festival, and thank you to Tesco for very kindly donating lots of fruit for half time!

Well done everybody!

Outdoor Learning

During last Thursday's Outdoor Learning, we visited the maze to investigate the types of minibeasts living there.

We used magnifying glasses and 'bug pots' to examine the minibeasts in more detail.

Once a cabbage butterfly landed on one of our hands and gave us a really good view!

 We even saw a dragonfly resting on the leaf of a plant near our pond.

Tag Rugby

Last week we had our last Tag Rugby session with Mark.

After our warm up activities, .... 

.... we were split into three teams and played several games.

Each time a try was scored, ....

.... we changed teams around.

Finally Mark talked to us about next week's whole school Tag Rugby festival and gave us some hints and advice.  

Thank you to Mark and Bruce for all their hard work during our Tag Rugby sessions this year.

Outdoor Learning

Last Thursday we carried out another minibeast hunt around the school grounds.  Last time we did this, it was a very wet day.  This time the sun was shining and it was very warm.  We wanted to compare how many minibeasts, and what types of minibeasts, we could find, compared to last time. 
We looked for minibeasts ...

... in the boat ...

... under the dolphin bin ...

... in the grass ...

... and even under the mushrooms!

We took magnifying glasses and bug collecting pots with us to examine what we found more closely, but we remembered that we had to handle any minibeasts very gently and return them to where we found them.

We found a spider's eggs below a stone.

Look at this!

Wow! That's amazing!

SSPCA talk

Last Tuesday Carol, from the SSPCA, visited Primary 3 to tell us about its work.

She told us all about the different kinds of animals which are helped by the SSCA.

Carol finished with a quiz to see how much we knew, then she reminded us of the phone number to call if we see an animal in need of help.

Painted Lady butterflies

Last week we were able to release our very own butterflies into the wild!  We have watched them grow from tiny caterpillars into much larger ones, then turn into chrysalises and finally change into beautiful Painted Lady butterflies.  Two of our class went down to Victoria's Garden to let them go amongst the flowers there.

the empty chrysalises

a butterfly just appeared in our 'insect garden'

releasing the butterflies

a beautiful Painted Lady butterfly

designing our own butterflies

Tag Rugby

Last Wednesday we had our first Tag Rugby lesson for this year.  There was very heavy rain first thing on Wednesday but, luckily, it had stopped raining by the time our lesson started, and it stayed dry nearly all the time we were outside. 

It was very cold though, so we enjoyed the warm up games!

Bruce reminded us of some of the skills which we learned last year.

 We practised our passing and catching skills.

Then we finished our lesson with a game of Tag Bulldogs!