Wednesday 25 May 2011

Bronze Age adventures.

Please read our adventure stories about travelling back in time to the Bronze Age. Mystery objects, strange languages, earth houses and carved stones...
Inspired by our archaeology topic and Michelle Paver's Chronicles of Ancient Darkness.



Here is an extract from Tom's story to get you hooked...

' ...as I held my phone firmly in my right hand, my phone seemed to be texting Charlie automatically. It said, 'I'm not going to make it...'  I lay in the mud and grabbed a plain, grey pebble and squeezed it as hard as I could as I felt myself spinning in circles. I tried to yell but I couldn't. I was out.'

Tuesday 24 May 2011

The climbing wall and the big tree

We hope these videos have given a flavour of the activities at Nethybridge.
It has taken a fair while to get these clips uploaded so that's all for now.

A disc of still photos will be available soon.

Friday 20 May 2011

Decimals and fractions

Try this game along with others (links in the menu bar) to keep your decimals dandy and your fractions friendly.
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Tuesday 17 May 2011

Transition Sports

Friday 13th May was Transition Sports day - a chance to meet and play sport with the other people who will be in S1 with us.

Badminton - warming up.

Football skills practice - passing and shooting.

Guards and warriors in hockey.

Lunch!

A great day altogether.

Wednesday 11 May 2011

Hatston field trip

Today we went on a field trip around the school, Peedie Sea and Hatston area.
We researched what we could before we went about a few specific sites in the area.

The future swimming pool site.
 First we noted where St Duthac's Chapel would have been, now the building site for the new pool.
Then we went on to the Pickaquoy Mound.


Sitting on the burnt mound.
 The Picky Mound is sited where two burns meet and was excavated in the middle of the 19th century but had already been excavated for stone - maybe for St Duthac's chapel. A stone with cup and ring marks was found here. The best place to go look at what it might have been like is Liddle in South Ronaldsay on the way to the Tomb of the Eagles.
The burnt mound and the building there has been excavated and its easy to see the structure. No one is quite sure what burnt mounds were used for. It may have been Bronze Age cooking, wool processing, a sauna.....

The Grain Earth House at Hatston was our next stop. We met our expert there - James Moore, an Iron Age specialist. He told us that there were other similar settlements in the area. The entrance to the souterrain would have been inside the house. James showed us where the door and the hearth would have been.

Entering by the steps in the modern extension.

Back out in the sunshine.
 We carried on to the Hatston slip. We had found out the types of airplanes which are in Kirkwall Bay and why the slip is so wide.
On Hatston slip - the airfield would have been nearby.

At Ayre Mills, having passed the old bridge and the site of the ford.
The Peedie Sea has changed a lot since the end of WW2.
We finished our journey back to school by walking across the new path on the reclaimed land, imagining what it might have been like when the sea went right up to the cathedral and before that when the old broch (where the RBS bank is today) looked out from the shore.

Friday 6 May 2011

Tag Rugby Festival

Today Glaitness P5, P6 and P7 pupils took part in the Tag Rugby Festival.
Here area  few photos of one of the teams, Glaitness 1, to give a flavour of the event.

Amy is tagged.

Surrounded by the greens.

Nice pass!
There was lots of good teamwork.
Well played everybody!

Thursday 5 May 2011

Wideford Hill archaeology investigations

On Wednesday we went to a field at Wideford Hill where we met archaeologist Christopher Gee and our friend Mary Saunders from ORCA. Chris showed us how he had marked out the field in a grid of 20m x20m squares. He needed to do this so that  a record could be made of where any finds had been made.


Mary showed us how geophysics technology could be used to survey the field and find out what was under the ground. When archaeologists have a picture of this they can decide where the best place on the site might be to investigate further.


The first machine looked at the magnetic field of what was around it, so our metal zips and buttons affected the results. Mary was wearing clothes which didn't have any metal in them so that she could take more accurate readings.


Telling the machine where NSEW is.
 The next machine send a signal down in to the ground and showed its results in a screen in the form of a spiky graph. We could see where it had detected something quite easily. It was important to move the machine at the right speed and cover the distance of a metre for each beep it sounded.


Meanwhile another group were fieldwalking and found some interesting stones. We could work out interesting information from most of them, though some of it was evidence of quite recent activity.


The GPS system that Mary used was accurate to 6mm. That meant that archaeologists coudl return to the site much later and find the precise place where an object was found.


Many thanks to Mary, Christopher and ORCA and Orkney College for allowing us to meet the experts in the field.

Choices for Life

This week we went to Choices for Life at the Pickaquoy Centre.
It helped us think about some difficult choices we might have to make in the next few years.

There was video real life stories and drama, as well as live drama acted out on stage.
There was some live music from teh MacDonald brothers and Carrie Mac too.

The MacDonald brothers.

Meeting the actors back at school.

Communication and coordination.
We finished off the day trying to adapt some of the Silver Maze puzzles to challenges we could do with our own playground equipment. This one worked very well and was seriously difficult!