5 October 2020

Starfish
 

Today we took our book of the week to the beach.  We listened to ‘Cake’ by Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet on the sand.  We took some pots, pans, bowls and spoons from the mud kitchen and used them to make lots of different cakes on the beach.  We decorated them with candles, shells, stones and seaweed.   We then made a huge cake using seaweed!

After snack we did some maths.  We did some counting, ordering numbers and writing numbers in the sand.  We also played a game where someone took a number away from the number line and we had to work out which one was missing.

There were some huge waves today, in fact the sea was so loud that we could hear it from the top of the hill when we were walking down this morning.  We decided that we would have a closer look.. The tide was far out so we had a long walk down to the sea.  We said that it looked like someone had been washing up as there was a lot of sea foam at the edge! We ran, skipped, hopped and jumped all the way back up the beach.

Before we went back to school we made up a song called ‘Four tall candles burning on the cake’, it wasa bit like ‘Five currant buns in a bakers shop’  but we pretended to be candles and we stood on our seaweed cake!

We were fascinated by a huge crow that was sitting on the log and we tried really hard not to scare it away.  As we got closer it did fly away but we heard it caw ‘Hello!’ 

We really enjoyed our cake making beach school day today!

Seals and Orcas
 
We started our day by watching the Big seaweed search to prepare us for our day at the Beach. We started our day at the Beach by doing some warm-up exercises and practising our frisbee skills before playing some frisbee games. We had to play in teams of two and pass the frisbee to all our team members before the other team intercepted our passes. We are all a very competitive bunch but they did an amazing job working together as a team to score points. We have spent the day talking about why seaweed is important and what seaweed may be used for. We have looked at Ocean Solidification and the effect it has on the type of seaweed we have that appears on the coastline. It was part of our seaweed research, where we picked our survey area and took photos of the different types of seaweed we found and the amount of seaweed we found. This allowed us to see what the impact of an increase in 2 degrees is in sea temperatures over 40 years. We found some spiral wrack seaweed, blood sponge, egg wrack, calcified rocks and gut weed. This is going towards part of our John Muir Award. There are 14 different types of seaweed for this survey but in the UK, there are 650 different types of seaweed.
We then recapped about who John Muir was and what he did in relation to National Parks. This led us to make our own ones on the beach using resources from the beach to do so.
After lunch at the Picnic Area in the Golf Club, we found a place to sit in the dunes to concentrate on our senses. The first sense we looked at was what can we see? Then we concentrated on what we could hear? After that, we looked at what we could smell? What could we touch? Finally, we thought about what we could taste? Following on from Carl Linnaeus who was known for identifying and naming organisms. This linked to Orcas science learning about classifying things.
We then went on a Walk to explore as the Victorians did. We went exploring along the dunes to the wall. We wrote down what we found in different words to allow the others to guess. For example, Mabel said the blue blanket which was the sky. After we shared our ideas, we wrote a newspaper article about the John Muir Award. They had to be truthful, interesting and we could use quotes from others in the class. The newspaper articles were all fantastically written and the children read their articles to everyone else. The children loved sharing their breaking news and Leighton showed his news reported skills by entertaining whilst sharing his news article. Some great lines were "you heard this right!" and "I think the John Muir Award is a great expedition to learn about the animals".