Beach cleaning

During the last three weeks we have all given up some of our lunchtime breaks to go to Scapa beach where we have been helping to clear away rubbish washed ashore by heavy seas and storms.

The beach was littered with bits of plastic, rope, packaging cord and all sorts of assorted 'disposable' items.

Each time we went we found something different! The most upsetting thing was finding creatures that had died and wondering what had caused them to die. Some of us had never seen a puffin before so it was sad that our first sight had to be a dead one.

We came across several birds, a seal and a sheep.

Some of the bits of rope and plastic were buried quite deeply in the sand and it took some effort to get them out.

The boys made a sled with some of the bigger stuff and used it to haul our pickings one day!

Every day we went we half filled the big bin so it was a good feeling to think about how many marine creatures we might have saved and it was satisfying to see the beach looking tidier.

There is still a lot of rubbish along the side of the road so plenty to do yet! I wonder if the council could bring along a machine to scoop it up? I think it calls for some letter writing!

We have had a good response from our posting on the Pick up three Pieces facebook page and all publicity helps.

Follow the link below and if you have a facebook account please like and share the page.

Pick up Three Pieces

Another useful and interesting page to follow is the Orkney Beachcombers page:

Orkney Beachcombing

See some more images of our clean up in the slideshow below.

Mardi Gras

Last week Elaine Geddes, music teacher, came into our class to talk about her Carnival experience in Rio de Jeneiro. She took part in the procession with a Samba School and wore a very elaborate and colourful costume. Here you can see it being modelled!

She also brought along samba drums so that we could have a go at learning the rhythms of samba music.

We made carnival masks in art using a variety of materials and colours. You can see them in the slideshow below. There will be a prize for the wackiest and the most beautiful one as judged by Ms Dennison.

Pick up 3 Pieces

Would you feed this to your child?

This is what birds and marine creatures are feeding on!
Watch this video to see the effect our rubbish is having and why we need to keep clearing our beaches.


MIDWAY : trailer : a film by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.

The cup dance!

Some of the girls have been practising the cup dance which requires a lot of cooperation and skill!
See how they got on.

The Churchill Barriers

The Churchill Barriers were very important to the defence of Scapa Flow in World War 2 so we have been investigating how they were built and who built them.
We had a go at making our own models using wooden blocks of different sizes.

making the models ...

completed and painted!

Steel drums!

This term we are looking at Carnivals and Mardi Gras celebrations around the world. We've been researching the types of music, costumes, feasting and dancing involved.
Last week we visited Papdale School to listen to their steel band and to have a go ourselves. Ms Geddes gave us some music to try on the steel drums and it was amazing how quickly we learned the different parts and put it all together as a recognisable tune.
Have a look at the slide show of us below and watch the video clip to see how we sounded after less than an hour of playing time!

Slide show

Playing our tune - can you tell what it is?

We are making colourful carnival masks in art and will post photos of them when they're finished. 

We learned that certain colours have meaning during the Carnival celebrations so we are making some designs using those colours for a display.

Purple Represents Justice. Green Represents Faith. And Gold Represents Power.

Playground Design

As an introduction to a real life project that we will be tackling soon, we tried out a challenge to design an imaginary playground.
Working in groups we each had an area of the playground to measure. Next we decided on a scale to use for our plans which we were drawing on squared paper.
We needed to design a piece of playground equipment to put in our playground. to do this we used multilink cubes.
The designs needed to be drawn in plan, side and front view.