Spring

Monday:

Tuesday: PE, Singing Superstars after school club

Wednesday: 

Thursday:

Friday: PE, change library books, Book Club at lunchtime

Indigo is one of our Library Ambassadors and she chose a book from Woodrow Library to share with the class. We enjoyed listening to Puffin Pete!

Autumn

Pufflings at Dancing Ledge, Dorset

What is a puffling? That was our first problem when we assembled jigsaw pieces to put together this interesting creature... which is actually a baby puffin! 

The National Trust contacted us because they needed a temporary campsite to be set up for a group of scientists studying the few remaining puffins at Dancing Ledge, on the coast of Dorset. There used to be a thriving puffin colony there, why were there so few puffins left? What was happening to the pufflings?

Dancing Ledge is a dangerous site - a sheer cliff face where the sea birds nest. There are rocks and the crashing waves of the sea below, and flat grassland with a public footpath at the top. Did we really have the expertise for such a challenging site?

The answer was of course! We have worked in other extreme locations before and luckily we had special tents which will hang off the side of the cliff for any scientists who were spending the night observing the puffins. 

We planned the site, including the main area on the flat grassland at the top of the cliff, the tents on the cliff face itself, and also a couple of boats on the sea below so the birds could be studied from there as well. 

It was extremely important to the National Trust that our site was temporary and sustainable to have no negative impact on the protected environment. It must not endanger any of the wildlife there, especially not the few remaining puffins!

We carefully discussed the meaning of sustainability and thought about how we would ensure that our campsite would leave no trace when it was removed. The scientists would be there for 6 weeks, so they needed electricity. Our options were to use solar power or wind power. We quickly decided not to use our portable wind turbine when we learned that, whilst they are mostly safe for birds, they can be dangerous if they are close to where there are a lot of birds. We couldn't risk the many seabirds that live at Dancing Ledge, so we decided to use only solar power.

But would the solar panels provide enough electricity? We decided to use solar cookers so that the electricity provided by the solar panels could be used just for the scientists laptops and equipment. 

We helped the scientists set up camera traps to check the wildlife on the site before they got there and discovered a lot of interesting creatures. We even saw a puffin! We used classification keys to identify what we had seen. But we also saw something worrying - there seemed to be a lot of brown rats. Could these be causing problems for the pufflings? And what was attracting so many of them?

We arrived one morning to discover the scientists were very concerned. An article in the local paper said that the National Trust was damaging Dancing Ledge and causing problems - oh no! We had to make sure that the newspaper was telling the true story, that the National Trust was working carefully to discover the problem with the puffins so they could help solve it. 

We still didn't know what was attracting all the rats. We had been so careful to make sure there were enough bins for the scientists to throw away their rubbish safely, and the bins had secure lids so rats could not get in. But then we saw a group of people who were coming to see what was happening, walking along the public footpath. And what did they do with their litter? They dropped it on the ground!

Clearly the general public needed somewhere safe to observe what was happening without disturbing the scientists, the puffins and to stop them dropping rubbish to attract more and more rats. We needed viewing pavilions! They had to be strong, stable and temporary. They would need a frame with some kind of cladding to provide shelter and to camouflage them. We looked at different pavilions, had a go at creating different frame structures, then designed our own pavilions using geometric shapes to create sturdy structures which had reinforced corners for stability. 

Thankfully this has solved the problem and the National Trust are really pleased with our work. The scientists have finished their work and we have removed the campsite completely without any negative impact on the environment.

MUSIC

In our Music in Autumn 1, we created body percussion compositions based on the 4 layers of the rainforest. We tried to create different textures - sometimes we were in unison (playing together at the same time), sometimes we used a call and response (one person then the other person) and sometimes we even had both performers doing different things at the same time.