Feed

We had a very busy time on this stunning day , first of all we had Hugo join us to look at our winter moth trap, after the cold night and full moon we had only one moth ! : THE ‘winter moth’ ! After that we covered our next igcse section : Water and Its Management We learned about : The water cycle Water sources The availability of safe drinking water Multi-purpose dams Water related diseases Water pollution Next we prepared an experiment in which we had 5 bowls which we filled with different concentrations of plant food . These ranged from all water to 100% plant food, then we placed four pieces of duck weed in each bowl and left them in the sun for a week . Our predictions were: the plants in the most concentrated one would die the plants in the second most concentrated one might die , will certainly not thrive the next one would do well the bowl with only a small amount in , we thought would do the best the plants in water would do ok To our great surprise after a week they were completely unchanged !!!!

On Friday the sixth of December ,Wessex home education group and a few others visited Kensons Farm in Sutton Mandaville for an incredible talk about organic vegetable farming . Our lovely guide Liz had prepared a talk which linked in perfectly with our gcse chapter and it was really great to see the words put into action . First we went through the different types of soil and compost used for organic farming Then we talked about different plants , crop rotation and green manures ! And then lastly we looked at how they grow and store their crops . Everybody thoroughly enjoyed the talk and felt they had extended what they learned from the text book *see blog post

A bit blustery and driech outside today with lots of leaves blowing everywhere so we were inspired to do some leaf art - we had to be quick though as the leaves kept blowing away down the street! We explored the shape, texture and colour of each leaf and then used some conkers we’d collected to make flowers with leaves as the petals.

We did the Halloween trail and loved it!

We did the Halloween Hunt trail around Callander on Saturday managing to avoid most of the rain and the wind! We learned about bats, toads, spiders, ravens and other ‘spooky’ animals. This morning we carved our pumpkin. We saved the seeds and gave them a wash before roasting them in the oven. We then crushed them up a bit breaking their hard cases and poked some into an apple before putting them outside on our bird feeder. We hope the birds enjoy them!

Lucas managed to find some conquers, acorns and also spotted some birdlife through his binoculars. Was a really fun activity and nice to get out and about! Steven & Lucas MacQueen

The autumn leaves are stunning this year, especially the golds and russet-browns. So we decided to see what colours really are in the different leaf colours and do some leaf chromatography. We used two solvents to separate out the leaf colour - acetone (nail polish remover) and rubbing alcohol (!). After cutting, grinding and squishing the leaves we wiped some of the colour onto strips of filter paper about 2cm from the bottom. These were then placed into jars with the solvent at the bottom. As the solvent moved up the filter paper, it drew out the different colours - the yellow and green can be seen clearly on both holly and green oak. The red leaf is Japanese Maple in our garden. Overall, we felt the acetone did a better job. Sweet chestnut, oak, dogwood and holly gave stronger colour than birch, hazel and rowan. The yellow leaves had no green in them but some had a hint of orangey-red.