Insect Hotels

P5 along with P2 gathered lots of sticks when we were out on our forest trips. Today P5 spent the morning creating hotels for insects. Some are for couples only, famous insects or there is even a fairy tale hotel. 

Beginning to round off our john muir award work now which we have all enjoyed. Hopefully the insects will enjoy their holidays as much as we will over the summer in their newly placed hotels. 

John Muir Trailers

Good job P5!!

You have worked very hard to put all your photos and video footage together to create a variety of different trailers for John Muir. 

They are great!!

Final Forest Trip

Well after some rain yesterday we were a little worried that the weather wouldn't hold up for us but we were once again very lucky and had perfect weather for our final venture to the forest. 

Lovely to see changes happening in nature that all the children had pointed out, especially all the buttercups that have appeared over the last two weeks in the area where we have our lunch. 

We found our wild place for the final time and sat quietly, taking in all that was around us and enjoying our special spots that we had found for the last time. 

Only one activity today.... building a fire!!! Scott from OWL was with us again today to help us out and after gathering in lots of wood we had a briefing about fire safety. 

Scott started the fire safely and we were then allowed to add some wood on before toasting our marshmallows over it. Many of us chose to put our melted marshmallow between two chocolate digestives to make a very yummy treat. 

After our treat we all sat around the fire enjoying the calm and peacefulness it provided before each sharing a little experience or feeling from our time in the forest and learning about John Muir. Each child got to put a little piece of wood in to the fire as they shared. It was a great way to round off all four sessions to the forest and nice to hear all the children's favourite things and their feelings about being in the forest. 

And finally we headed home, hopefully having inspired a group of P2 and P5 children to protect and enjoy wild places with their families and friends and to continue to learn about the work of John Muir and continue to share their experience in the forest with others. 

Well done P2 and P5, you have been brilliant in the forest. Listening was good, enthusiasm was great, taking part was fantastic and overall I would say that we all now LOVE the forest in our local area. 

Senses Poems

**UNFORTUNATELY I CANNOT UPLOAD THE VIDEOS OF 

'GOING ON A BEAR HUNT'**

P5 have used the sentences that they created in the forest using their senses to create poems. We created round robin poems where one person would write about what they saw, fold it over, pass on their piece of paper and with the paper they received write about what the heard and so on until the poem was complete. It was then the responsibility of the 6th person to read out the 'secret' poem to the rest of the class. Some good descriptive language was used to create the poems. Well done P5!

Read some of our poems below

Forest Trip 3

What a lovely day it was for a trip to the forest - nice and warm and the sun was shining!

As always we began with finding our wild place and sat quietly enjoying it, listening to noises around us and looking to see if anything had changed. 

We were working in four groups today and rotating round four different stations; using storm kettles, filming 'Bear Hunt', senses game, creating a character and litter picking. 

Storm Kettles

Scott who is Edinburgh's outdoor development officer came to teach us how to use storm kettles to make yummy hot chocolate. He was helped by Abbi and we had great fun collecting small twigs to start the little fire needed to heat the water and then needed to collect bigger twigs to keep it going. Scott made it in to a little competition to see who boil their water first. 

Senses Game

Miss McArthur was encouraging groups to use their senses and think of descriptive sentences they could write about what they saw, heard, touched and smelt. 

Create a character

Theresa and Linda with their groups were conserving the forest area by collecting litter to keep it clean, tidy and protected. The groups also had to use something in the forest (tree, leaf, rock) to create characters using a nose, eyes and mouth. 

Bear Hunt

Mrs McCafferty's groups were filming 'Going on a bear hunt' to help with the nursery/P1 transition project. Hopefully there will be some video footage of this in another blog...