Category: Science

Food Webs

One of the topics we are covering as part of the British Council’s Connecting Classrooms program is food webs which was suggested by Mr Thembo, the headteacher of Kafuro Primary School.

Steve Peach very kindly produced a PowerPoint which took the children through the differences between food chains and food webs. Mr Stanley was very impressed with the children’s knowledge of food chains and the terms producer, consumer and predator. Only one pupil in the class had a good idea about what a food web is, so Mr Stanley was able to use the PowerPoint (displayed below) to show some examples of food webs in both UK and Uganda.

Once the children had got used to the idea of what a food web meant, we created our own using animals commonly found in the UK

We then went onto the playground with a big ball of string in order to try and replicate this food web. The photos below make it look as if we were actually quite successful. However, the complexity of the food web meant that we actually ran out of string before we could complete it.

Our final discussion of the session was based around what might happen to the food web if one of the elements was removed from it. We discussed several possibilities, but the children concluded that if the frog was removed from our food web then much of the web could collapse. Clearly removing land plants or water plants would have a massive effect on the ecosystem. When you think about the damage this would cause and then compare it to vast deforestation taking place on our planet, it makes you wonder whether humans are actually very clever at all!

We are looking forward to seeing what food webs other schools in the twinning project produce.

Semuliki National Park visit

Greetings to all of our friends in Kafuro and the other twinned schools in Uganda. In August, Mr Stanley visited Semuliki National Park, north of Fort Portal. He cooked boiled eggs in one of the hot springs. We would like to ask all of our friends in Uganda how a hot spring works. Can you explain this to a UK pupil? Please reply when you have an explanation.

Liss weather station is now in operation

Yesterday, the long awaited Liss Junior School weather station was finally installed. Mr Haycock got on to the roof to install the weather vane and Neil, our technician, made sure that the wireless signal and internet connections were working properly.

Within minutes the weather station was sending in data. Just like Kafuro, we have a console which is kept in the school office, but it also possible to read our data from anywhere in the world. You can:

a) Click on the widgit at the top of the Kafuro/Liss blog home page

b) Access our Davis link

c) Access our Weather Underground link

Now both schools have weather stations, we hope to swap data on daily basis so that we can run maths and science investigations next year.

Cob Oven Cooking

In history, we have been learning about the Saxons. We found out that Saxons had ‘feasts’ and a typical food that would have been available were ‘Oat Cakes’. The Saxons would have had to use fire lit ‘ovens’ to bake their oat cakes. To have a real experience of this, we lit our own Cob Oven and had a go at making Saxon Oat cakes.

Whilst we were outside cooking, we had noticed that the pear trees in our school garden we full of delicious fruit! We harvested the pears and had a go at making them in to pear crumble.

Have a look at our photos. You can see what we thought of our Cob Oven fayre!

With the pears we had found in the garden, we made a pear crumble! Here we are doing our magic in the kitchen;

DC visit the Sustainability Centre

These are just some of the activities we took part in at the Sustainabilty Centre. The water challenge was our way of understanding what it is like to have to carry your water home rather than just turn on a tap.

The wonderful tree spirits will hopefully remain in place for a long time.

 

School Grounds Day continued…

We were so busy on School Grounds Day, we didn’t get to complete all the tasks we wanted to. This week, we filled our toilet rolls with soil and planted our seeds of radish, sweet peas, purple carrots, and cornflower. Once our seedlings have grown enough, we will be able to transplant them to our tyre planters.

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We are continuing to look after our Garlic that we are growing for a Countryside Competition. Our Giant Elephant Garlic and common Garlic are growing well, fingers crossed for the Countryside Competition day in June.

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…. And finally, we were kindly given some frog spawn this week. We have been fascinated to watch how quickly the frog spawn are growing and developing into tadpoles. We are learning what the tadpoles like to eat and how to nurture them carefully. We hope to release them in to our newly cleared pond area when the froglets are big enough! Thank you to Angus’ family for the frog spawn!

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School Grounds Day

On Thursday, we had one of our ‘Best Day Ever’ moments! We spent the whole day outside in and around our School grounds. There were many jobs to be done. We started the day by learning how to weave willow in to different shapes. Louise, our friend, came to teach us how to do this, and also helped us make our own ‘Wigwam’ for our Sweet Pea plants to climb up. We also helped tidy up the Willow Arbor that is sited on the school field, by weaving loose willow back into its structure.

Our next job was to cut the turf away from where our tyre planters were going to sit. After that stage had been done, we filled the tyres with soil….. LOTS of soil! It took many trips down the slope to the large sacks of soil, with our buckets to fill. It was quite a “tyre-ring” (boom boom!) job for all of us.

We were glad when it was soon time for our picnic lunch on the playground with our families. After lunch, we were able to spend some time helping Mr Haycock with the construction of our bottle greenhouse. Sean and Charlie lifted some wood for Mr Haycock to saw, helped by Billy.

Then, time for more soil shifting! It wasn’t too long before we were able to plant our seedlings and Sweet Peas and place our Willow Wigwam. All our hard work was well worth it as we were able to stand back and admire our efforts. We wandered around the rest of the school grounds to admire everyone else’s efforts with their class projects too. We were very proud of our school before this day, but we can definitely be super proud now. It looks fabulous. Well done and a huge thank you to all our children, families and friends who helped us.

Butternut Squash Soup

After our trip to Durleighmarsh Farm, we wanted to make something tasty with our Butternut Squash that we had bought back from the farm. We decided to make a tasty, warming soup;

Our questions for our friends at Kafuro Primary – Do you cook the crops you grow? What do you like to cook and eat? What foods don’t you like?

 

Our trip to Durleighmarsh Farm

We have been to visit Alison at Durleighmarsh Farm to look at how the seasonal changes affect the crops. Alison showed us the different types of squash and pumpkin. The leaves on the plants had changed colour as we are moving from Autumn through to Winter. We noticed how the plants were dying away, preparing to ‘sleep’ for the winter before coming back again in the Spring.

We had a great time with Alison and are looking forward to seeing her again in the Spring.

When we got back we wrote our reports of our trip. Here is our work;

We would like to know from our friends at Kafuro Primary School, how the climate changes with the seasons and how the crops change for this time of year.