A wedding at Corrigall

Class 7 visit Corrigall Farm Museum as part of their Emigration and Exploration topic. There is a double wedding this year with music, singing and dancing. The wedding ends with an announcement that two members of the wedding party are to leave for the Nor' Wast to join the Hudson Bay Company.

We hope you enjoy the video as much as we enjoyed our day at Corrigall and we look forward to your comments!

Kirbister and Corrigall Farm museums

This week we visited Kirbister and Corrigall farm museums. We found out about life on an Old Orkney farm in the morning and the drama developed at the wedding in the afternoon.
Here is a slide show of the family groups around the hearth at Kirbister and the fireplace at Corrigall.

                                   

Keep visiting our blog to view the video of the wedding - soon to be published here!

Shared ancestors and making model shelters

Kim Foden came in to tell us about her ancestor who worked for the Hudson Bay Company in the 1700s.

She found out that he had a Cree family and that she had cousins at Sturgeon Lake in Saskatchewan.

When she went to visit them she realised how many of the First Nations people had Orkney names because of their shared ancestry.

You can see more about the link here.

Kim tells us about the life of the Orkneymen who went to work for the Hudson Bay Company.

The Hudson Bay Company traded in furs of all kinds but the beaver was the most important.



The furs were traded for beads, metal items and blankets like this 4 point blanket.

The model teepee.
Each pole represented an important value to the Cree people.

Kim showed us lots of traditional crafted objects she had been given by her Cree family.

                              

After building the model teepee Class 7 tried to design and make their own model shelters using similar types of materials. The materials and the time allowed were limited.

It proved to be a real challenge!

Which group would you go camping with?

Rookie lifeguards go snorkelling!

Class 7 are all taking part in the after school pool sessions this year. Every term we will be doing something different. This term we are starting off with snorkelling and octopush skills. Along with Mr Geddes and Ms Spence we are being coached in the water by two pupils who started their octopush in P7 at Glaitness.

The boys listen to Thorfinn.

 We have been practising duck diving and clearning our snorkels.

The girls practise their duck dives.

We have been using fins.

The girls in a synchronised dive.

Swimming along the surface.

The boys look confident underwater.

Alongside developing these skills we are now all taking part in the Rookie Lifeguard course which will help us and others to stay safe in and around water. We will be working our way through the course at our own individual pace, so everyone can take part and achieve either the bronze, silver or maybe even gold certificate.

Hectares,cakes and willow art

 We began the week with a visit to the outfield at Picky to find out how big a hectare was.

We used the trundle wheel to measure out the 100m sides of the square.

We tried to keep the opposite lines parallel.

We stood at 25m  intervals along the sides of the hectare.

It gave us a good idea of how big a hectare is!

Using the 1:25 000 OS map which is laid out in a grid of square kilometres.

Back indoors we used maps to try to understand the size of the hectare compared to a square kilometre.

We continued the week with a bake sale to find out how big our appetites were!

Thanks to all our families for providing for the ever popular fund raising event. The money raised will pay for transport costs for our P7 trips.

We finished the week by displaying our Willow Art...

...and our Class mesostic poem about Muddisdale in our exhibition area.

Important qualities for a headteacher

These are the qualities we think are important for our new headteacher to have.

Archives, Art and Amazing Robots

This week we visited the archives at the library in Kirkwall. Peter showed us around the exhibition he had created all about schools in Orkney in the past. We completed a quiz which helped us to look closely at the different types of evidence. There were photographs, newspaper articles, school certificates, teacher's logs, exam results and much more.

Some of the writing was quite hard to decipher.

Looking at a school timetable to find out the differences between what boys and girls studied.

We also spent some time browsing and reading in the fiction section on our quest to choose two new readers for Primary 7!

Our land art activities continued with a visit to Muddisdale on Wednesday afternoon. We took photographs of things which we could not take away and arranged items we had collected from the school grounds.

Soon we will have a lot of work in our 'exhibition' area outside our classroom.

As part of our own school's MudFest we went to Muddisdale to create land art. We experimented in class first then went to create our own work on and around the path.

Everyone made a contribution to the group discussion.

Working as a team to create art.

Sorting out the resources by colour.

Careful construction, discussing as the sculpture is created.

Whitebeam berries on dockan leaves and combed grass.

Torn leaves in a line on the path.

Grass ring filled iwth grass seed on the path.

Rose hip circles on cut grass.

We left our pieces of art behind and wondered what people walking through Muddisdale would think when they saw it. Perhaps we should tell people about our 'path art'! Will it still be there....?
It is all natural and will not hurt the environment. We didn't use any processed resources and created no rubbish at all. It is sustainable art!

As part of the Science festival we took part in a robot programming workshop given by Chris Martin and Jon Urch of the University of Dundee. We learned how to programme the robots to move  in different ways which we put together to make the robots dance. The aim was to have a 'dance off' by making each of the robots dance to music for 20 seconds. It was great fun and we learned about programming and how robots can be used to do jobs which might be impossible for people to do.

Each command made the robot do something different.

The programme had to be downloaded to the robot.

Ready for the dance off!

Here is a video of the dance off...