From the rod to the plate!

From the rod to the plate

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When considering the ecology of the River Forth habitat we felt it was very important to look at the role of the fish in the history of East Lothian communities. The link between the river, its wildlife and towns such as MUSSELburgh is obvious – but most of the small villages and towns on the coast have had a fishing heritage of some sort. Cockenzie, Port Seton, Prestonpans, Eyemouth, Dunbar…we could go on and on. All of these places have at some point been fishing communities of varying degrees – and the fish has played a pivotal role in the economics of the area, as well as being a crucial part of the food chain…

Musselburgh fishwives from the past…

Boats in our local harbour

Although the local fishing industry has declined in recent years the harbour at Port Seton still retains a small fleet of vessels, mainly fishing for prawns. Meanwhile, East Linton and Haddington are famous for there excellent fishing spots along the river Tyne, and Cockenzie, Portseton, Dunbar and North Berwick are all excellent for deep sea fishing.

The science lessons entitled “From the rod to the plate” endeavours to bring this important aspect of local culture into the classroom with the food chain at the heart of it as the scientific “big concept” to be explored. It also comes as reinforcement of the “Old Lady who swallowed a fly” food chain lesson earlier in proceedings…

The attached worksheet files show how we used prior knowledge and local resources to bring a cultural aspect of the community very much into the laboratory…by very much literally bringing parts of the community into the laboratory!

It should be noted that we introduce the topic by having an introductory session on East Lothian’s fishing traditions – assessing prior knowledge and painting the historical picture to give the lesson context in terms of our thematic programme. We will also use this series of lessons to compare and contrast our local traditional fishing methods with those of other countries across the globe…whilst also looking at the Celtic myths and fairytales surrounding those who work and live on the sea.

SALKIE BRIDE MYTHS AND TALES

SCOTTISH CRAB FISHERMAN

SCOTTISH FLY FISHING

TROPICAL INDIAN OCEAN FISHING – JUST LIKE COCKENZIE?

We’re going on a bug hunt!

Bug Hunting in East Lothian

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As part of the Enhanced Learning Provision Science programme we will be considering the idea that animals and plants live in special places we call “habitats”. We have introduced the concept with the “Habitats lesson” you can find on these pages (link on the right hand side of the screen). This lesson looked primarily at the river habitat we have on our doorstep – the River Forth.

However, it was also important that we look at alternative habitats in East Lothian and not simply concentrate alone on the wonderful subject that is the River Forth. In this series of lessons, we took our toes out of the cold North Sea waters and tread inland to more rural surrounds…

One aspect of the rural habitat lessons is the ability for the teacher to introduce some simple but fundamental aspects of being a biologist to all the children. We learn how to use a number of pieces of equipment and practices that the mainstream pupil also undertakes. In particular, the lesson described here teaches the children how to conduct a simple wildlife survey…

What lives in the local habitat? How many species? What number of each species? How can we represent that in simple scientific terms that allow us to show other people our findings?

The children learn how to use quadrats in the field:

They also learn about the different types of insect species in their chosen habitat (the grounds and playing fields of Preston Lodge High School).

They use basic numeracy skills to count the numbers of each type of insect…which they record whilst “in the field”.

Whilst, at the end of our great outdoors adventure, we use the information we have collected to create a special chart using our ICT skills and a computer based spreadsheet called Excel.

Please see the attached Insect Survey worksheets used to undertake our East Lothian bug hunt!

Hello Ohio!

Over the coming months we hope to link up with fellow high school pupils who live across the Atlantic Ocean…

These students are pupils in the state of Ohio in the United States of America…

The USA is a much larger country than Scotland and has many things that are very different to our way of life – but there are many, many things about our two homelands that are the same (or very similar). We all speak English for starters – which will be a big help in communicating with each other!

We hope that the pupils of Preston Lodge in Prestonpans, East Lothian, Scotland can share their every day experiences with our friends in Ohio – helping them learn about our land through the work we produce for our school thematic programme for 2008 “On our doorstep”…

In turn, we would love to learn about Ohio – and Akron in particular.

We are so keen to know (amongst a million number of things!)

* what their weather is like compared to ours?
* how many people live there compared to Prestonpans?
* what do they study at school?
* what sports do they like and play?
* what music and television is popular there – and is it similar or different to ours?
* what we can learn about the wildlife, countryside and farming in Ohio
* do any of you speak any other languages in addition to English?
* what famous people have gone to your school or came from your town?

For example, Scotland’s most capped international rugby player, Scott Murray, and Scotland international soccer player, Gary O’Connor both were pupils at Preston Lodge. Also world famous artist, John Bellany came from our community and is still a strong supporter of our school. We wonder if what famous people came from Akron, Ohio?

SCOTLAND INTERNATIONAL RUGBY PLAYER SCOTT MURRAY WENT TO PRESTON LODGE HIGH

SCOTLAND INTERNATIONAL SOCCER PLAYER GARY O’CONNOR ALSO WENT TO PRESTON LODGE HIGH

WORLD RENOWNED BELLANY WORK PORTRAYING LOCAL FISHING VILLAGE EYEMOUTH

The Life of (Preston Lodge) Plants…

As a follow up to our Weather project in the spring term, we plan to undertake our own “Life of Plants” project through the summer term 2008. Paying homage to Sir David Attenborough’s own BBC science series of the same name, we plan to bring you “The Life of (Preston Lodge) Plants…”

Full lesson plan details will be linked to this page in due course however, in the meantime, the project outline includes:

* the pupils undertaking the daily care routine of the school glasshouse
* the pupils choosing which species of plant to stock in the glasshouse
* buying and planting the chosen species of plants
* developing a watering/feeding regime and creating a class rota for jobs
* the learning of “housekeeping” techniques
* making a record of our progress using various media
* making our own presentation “The Life of (Preston Lodge) Plants…”
using techniques and experiences learned during the East Lothian Weather project
* keeping weekly photographic records of our activities
* using our glasshouse and it’s produce for an enterprise activity
* learning more about the biology of our plants
* learning more about the natural habitats our plants grow in
* learning more about the plants growing in East Lothian and comparing them with the plants
we might find elsewhere on the planet
* A visit to the local farm shop
* A visit to the Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh
* A visit to John Muir Country Park

Here is the weather with Preston Lodge’s own Heather the Weather!

Introduction to our weather!

The ELP pupils will be undertaking a series of lessons in the spring 2008 term that link in nicely to the current 5-14 Earth and Space curriculum.

With the umbrella cross curricular theme of “Life in East Lothian” also firmly underpinning all we do, we will be looking at the weather…with the Prestonpans climate the focus of our learning activities.

Instead of one or two stand alone lessons on the weather we wanted to take the opportunity to extend this area of science across the curriculum. The linked lesson plans show how we intend to incorporate the following into the project

Through introducing the weather by drawing on the pupil’s experiences of the East Lothian climate we can quickly get a feel for the student’s prior knowledge, in addition to creating a mind map of their own ideas to be used to plan the weather project we will undertake over the spring term weeks.

The ultimate plan is that the pupils will make their own Preston Lodge weather forecast presentation using video and animation techniques – but only after they themselves have come up with the ideas we will use to plan the project. We have a “teacher scaffold” in mind that should allow their own ideas to grow in a supported way – but what we do, where we do it and how we do it will have pupil ownership.

Nominally called “Here is the weather with Heather the Blether” – as tongue in cheek tribute to the BBC Scotland weather forecaster, Heather Reid, our project will hopefully allow our very own “Heather the Weathers” to come forth…

As the week’s pass between the Christmas holidays and the Easter break our young Enhanced Learning Programme scientists will be able to log their activities and progress on this page of the Preston Lodge website.

Please feel free to come back during this period to get a feel for their work in progress!

Counting down to Christmas

In the month of November our ELP group will be working on a special cross curricular activity during Period 3 on a Friday (the last lesson of the week).

The lesson will be something of a literacy-meets-numeracy-meets-arts-meets-RME-meets-enterprise extravaganza!

The overall theme of this group of lessons will be “Our Christmas”.

Our Christmas will be part of the ELP umbrella theme “On our doorstep – life in East Lothian (and the River Forth)”. It will encourage our pupils to undertake a number of creative tasks which focus on how we build up to Christmas in our school, our families and our area. The pupils will be encouraged to enhance literacy and numeracy skills in every practical activity we undertake, in addition to having the opportunity to express themselves through art. A component part of the project will also include enhancing enterprise skills.

The activities we undertake will be included on this page over the month of November – we hope to include both photographic and written examples of our work. We will also plot our progress as a mini-diary – with the children dictating what gets written in it, not the staff!

A general outline of areas we hope to include:

• Numeracy – a “count down” to Christmas (Christmas and numbers)

• the month of December (dates and calenders – literacy/numeracy)

• planning how to run our own PL Christmas Shop (enterprise, money, teamwork)

• planning what to sell in our PL Christmas Shop (enterprise, teamwork, creative arts)

• producing the goods for the shop (team work, creative arts)

• marketing our venture to the rest of the school (enterprise)

• operating our venture in the month of December (enterprise, money, literacy)

• assessing how well we did (the need for reflection)

We will also look at how others in the school and community are preparing for Christmas.

This might include:

• Taking part in the whole school Christmas Lunch
• Observing or contributing to whole school Christmas performances
• Going to the school carol concert for the local pensioners
• Observing or helping out with other school Christmas enterprise initiatives
• Christmas in the community (Prestonpans Christmas lights etc)
• A trip to the Christmas Market in Edinburgh
• A trip to Winter Wonderland in Edinburgh
• A trip to the pantomime in Musselburgh

Surving an East Lothian winter – making bird cake!

Introduction to animals in winter

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Part of the programme of lessons on habitats and food chains in East Lothian includes thinking about how wildlife copes during the various seasons. In particular, as the year draws to a close we will be looking at how wildlife survives the winter months.

We will cover areas such as

• hibernation
• food (and water) availability
• keeping warm
• changes in coat
• changes in habitat
• migration

In particular, we will concentrate on birds and their behaviours during the winter months. As part of a series of lessons looking at local birdlife in winter months, we will make our own bird cake and bird feeder. We have already set up our own bird table in a school courtyard, courtesy of the woodwork skills of an S5 pupil and we will use this as a base for our bird watching activities over the winter months.

See the attached link for our bird cake recipeQ

Improvisation maths at the restaurant, hairdresser and cinema…

Maths lessons can take a number of guises!

Through working with the S1 pupils in the Enhanced Learning Provision it has become apparent that they have a strong interest in role play. They are very good at relating the things that happen in everyday life to the lessons in the classroom and often spontaneously enter into impromptu role plays to enact the concepts or areas we are talking about or working on.

We feel that it is very important that we encourage these situations as they not only allow the children to express themselves when simply using words might not convey their thoughts so effectively, but it also allows us to look at real life scenarios in the classroom. All it takes is a loss of inhibition on the part of the teacher or auxiliary!

In maths we have already enjoyed “visits to the restaurant” (where we went along to the school canteen after it had closed for the day and acted out the process of :

• looking at the menu

• finding out what things cost

• working out whether we have enough money on our smart card

• ordering our food, sometimes in multiples to encourage numeracy skills (two pizzas, one fish and a chicken sandwich please!)

• finding a table by number

• working out how many seats our party need

• working out how many chairs might be left over at the table

• working out how many chairs in total there are at the table (those with bottoms on them + those that are empty)

• working out if we can afford to go back for pudding

Alternative improvisations have included acting out a trip to the hairdresser or the cinema. Similar skills and scenarios arise that are linked to telling the time, counting money, buying numbers of tickets etc.

It is remarkable how much prior knowledge is teased out of the children in this manner as opposed to us simply doing an exercise in a jotter, on a worksheet or interactively. It also enables us to concentrate on incorporating other life skills into the lesson without the pupils realising (where do the knife and fork go on the table? which hand do we hold them with? what should we say to a waitress or waiter to be polite?)

 

An impromptu Shark Tale!

The Evening News photographs that changed

a week’s worth of Science lessons!

 

The nature of the Enhanced Learning Provision Science program lends itself to a significant degree of flexibility. The ability to stop and further explore concepts – sometimes over a couple of lessons -when a pupil makes an insightful contribution can be priceless. These times are sometimes referred to as “Eureka! Moments” by teachers.

This sort of change to the planned lesson outlines occured in spectacular fashion in the week of October 8th…when the Edinburgh Evening News of Saturday October 6th became the focus for a slight detour.

On the front page of the Evening News on the 6th October, the headline “Jaws drop as shark turns up on beach” was accompanied by a story of a basking shark being stranded in Musselburgh – just a few minutes up the coast from Prestonpans.

The Enhanced Learning Provision Science program were in the middle of a series of lessons and activities looking at the science of the River Forth – as part of our cross-curricular project on East Lothian. In fact, that very week the pupils had begun constructing their own model of an East Lothian beach – thinking about what sort of plant and wildlife might be present and where they might “live” in the river.

The story in the local newspaper was a fabulous opportunity to look more closely at this remarkable event on our own doorstep – and to consider it from a scientific perspective. It was indeed a Eureka Moment.

The story by H Mollinson in the Evening News had started with the following paragraph:

“It looked more like a scene from Jaws than an average day on peaceful Fisherrow Beach in East Lothian. People enjoying a quiet stroll could not believe their eyes when they saw a three-metre shark lurking in the shallows.

The basking shark, which had strayed from its normal habitat on the west coast of Scotland, was washed up injured on the beach yesterday. Despite a five-hour struggle by animal welfare workers to return it to the sea, the giant fish later died.

Marine experts think the shark may have followed shoals of plankton around the northern tip of Scotland and into unfamiliar east coast waters”.

The terms highlighted in bold green font were all terms we had been using the week before in class when thinking about how to plan our model of the beach. Here, only a couple of days later, was an exciting story in the newspaper that talked about many of the things we had discussed ourselves as a group.

We brought a hard copy of the paper into the classroom. It was to form the starting point for a very exciting and engaging conversation. We decided to allow the story to take us in an unplanned direction – and one that would allow us to bring in some literacy skills, numeracy skills and ICT skills.

As a group we part-read, part-listened to the full story of the Musselburgh shark. We then went on line to see if there were any other stories on the internet about our very own local Shark Tale. Of course, there were! We searched for some on line images that we might be able to use for any work we produced ourselves in the classroom.

We decided to make our own mind map showing all the things we had learned about the shark so far – we were surprised how much information we already had!

The ideas included:

• the location of the stranded shark

• the age of the shark

• the length of the shark

• the time and date of the shark incident

• the pictures we found in the paper and online of the story

• other witness accounts of the incident

• the shark species name

• the usual habitat of the basking shark

• the usual diet of the basking shark

Once we had looked at all the information we already had, we thought it would be a good idea to do something with it. However, it was important the pupils had ownership of what that may be…

As a group we decided to make a presentation on the shark stranding to go alongside our model beach. This would involve the students:

• creating a visual image of the shark as a centre piece (arts and/or ICT photography)

• creating a clay model basking shark to be included in our model beach

• presenting the data about the shark eg length, age etc (could extend this to also be incorporated into our maths lesson)

• presenting the media clips/cuttings in a way that others could also access them

• laminating the presentation for longevity (life skills)

The students thought they could report it “as if David Attenborough had been there” – they had this inspiration from having been fascinated by clips of the BBC’s Blue Planet used in an earlier lesson.

As far as Eureka Moments go, this was one of Great White proportions!

 

 

 

 

Preston Lodge has a lot of windows and doors…

Window count

The pupils were given a very special task in maths one day…

Seemingly, the window cleaner was due in the school but he did not know how many windows he was going to have to clean! In turn, this meant he did not know how much water or cleaner he would have to bring with him to Preston Lodge. This was a big problem – a big problem that would need a special crack counting team to solve!

When arriving in maths on this particular day, there was a memo for the S1 ELP pupils – a memo their teacher read to them carefully. The memo told of the window cleaner’s dilemma and asked for volunteers to help him by counting the windows at Preston Lodge. The only criteria being that the volunteers would have to:

• be good at working as a team

• know their way around Preston Lodge

• be good at counting up to 10

• be keen to help

• be able to report back in simple terms how many windows they found

Of course, all of our fabulous S1 pupils responded positively – which meant that all there was left to do was organise themselves into a window counting team extraordinaire.

The children were encouraged to discuss how they might make their measurements. They knew there were lots and lots of windows to count – more windows than they could count in one go. They devised their own plan to enable all of them to make a contribution. It was simple and effective. Lets count the windows in small blocks of eight (as they had noticed how many of the sides of the school had blocks of eight windows) and do a tally system. One tally line for every block of 8 windows they could find!

They then decided to split the school up into four sides. They called these four sides:

• facing the Power Station (north)
• facing Musselburgh (west)
• facing Seton Sands (east)
• facing the shops on the top road (south)

Each side of the school had its own tally sheet. As the pupils went round the school building in an anti-clockwise direction to make sure they did not miss any windows, they would stop and ask themselves which direction each set of windows were facing. Landmarks like the Power Station were ideal in helping them consider their bearings at all times.

The tally sheets were then totalled with help from the teacher and the sum total windows at Preston Lodge High School was determined.

The pupils were then in a position to send in a simple A4 report to the school, in order that the window cleaner could begin cleaning the windows.