John Muir wildflower garden

This has been blooming over the summer break and it was such a delight to discover upon the return to school. Isn't this just glorious? Well done to the last year's P6 John Muir group who cleared this overgrown flowerbed of weeds and put new top soil in before scattering this colourful selection of wildflowers.

The Magic Door and the Baby Dragon! 🐲

Primary 1 went looking for some inspiration for their story writing in our wonderful outdoor space and boy did they find it! First of all they found a magic door which made them wonder about the infinite possibilities of who/what lived behind it.

THEN theyfound a baby dragon!!! 

(Thankfully it wasn't mature enough to breathe fire.)

🐉 

Buttercups, Tadpoles, Dragonflies and Divers-all in a John Muir Session!

The members of the Wednesday group are working on creating a wildflower meadow along the canal bank by the Whitecrook bridge to support the pollinators there. Today they carried out another bug survey to compare the results from a cool cloudy day to the warm and bright weather we enjoyed today. We saw dragonflies, bees, flies, butterflies and may more flying insects.


The group delivered information leaflets to local resident highlighting the work that they will be  doing to create the wildflower meadow.

Delivering their information leaflets

Enjoying making butterfly chains

Doing the pollinator survey

Counting the number of insects which land  in the 1m square in a two minute period.

The brown grass has been prepared for the wildflower meadow by The Environment Trust.

Pollen!

Tadpoles!

Friendly insects

The rescued motorbike.

Biodiversity at Linnvale

Classes throughout the school have been working on Eco topics as part of an Eco focus fortnight. P1 chose to find out about bees, P1/2 focused on learning about trees and P2 have been learning about mini-beasts. Here is a sample of some of their work-isn't it fantastic?

P1 made these fantastic posters about Bees

P2 shared their mini-beast work-sin't it beautiful

P2 are caring for butterflies in their classroom

Then they wrote about the lifecycle of a butterfly.

P3 learned about reducing waste by reusing items and they designed posters to encourage to follow their lead.

P3 made a water run in the playground using old drain pipes and hoses.

P1 have been growing pollinator friendly plants from seed.

P1 learned about the parts of a plant and made this colourful display.

The parts of a bee.

Their bee illustrations accompanying their writing is fabulous!

What a well drawn honeycomb!

Outdoor Poetry P4/5

P4/5 came outside this morning to write a short, five-lined poem inspired by what they could see/hear. They all used alliterations in their observational poems to add interest to them. Once they had written them, they practised reciting them and each pair shared their poetry with the rest of the class.

Measuring our trees!

All sorts of weird and wonderful ways were used to measure the height of school trees-form pythagorus to measuring sticks! 

                    

John Muir Wednesday Group

Our latest cohort of pupils working to gain the John Muir Award went out to carry out an OPAL survey about the pollinating plants in the local landscape. The children marked out a 10x10m square and meticulously scanned each square metre noting the wildflowers in bloom. They recorded their findings and logged them on the OPAL website. We were joined by Mark Hand of The Environment Trust who was there to discuss how we could improve the biodiversity on this piece of ground.

Showing their findings to Mark.

!