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...