Bird of the Day - the Swift

After spending a few minutes refilling the bird feeders and bird bath, my 5 junior birders from Class 4 and I had a walk looking for one particular bird - Swifts.

They are easy to spot at this time of year - look for an all black bird that flies with its wings like a boomerang. They are quite noisy too, especially in the evening. We managed to spot two groups of swifts circling round above school. The children did very well at remembering these awesome facts about swifts:
1. Swifts can fly for 4 years without landing
2. They can eat, drink and sleep on the wing
3. They are one of the fastest flying birds reaching 70mph - the same as a car on the motorway.

Other lovely finds on our walk were a 7-spotted ladybird and a common blue butterfly.

Until next time
Mrs Longmoor

Derbyshire Travel Smart Week

It's that time of year again!  This week at Parklands we are participating in the Derbyshire Travel Smart Week.  It's a glorious week of sunshine so how are you going to get to school?  Make use of the scooter park and scoot in the sunshine or why not walk to school and play on the way?  Which ever way you choose make sure you wear a sunhat and suntan cream.  Have a good week!

International Biodiversity Day!

On May 22^nd 2012 the Eco team held an assembly to celebrate International Biodiversity day.

The whole school assembly was organised by Helen Hallows and was attended by all the staff  and introduced by Mrs Meller.

We were pleased to welcome eleven geography students from the Wilsthorpe leadership academy (with their teacher Miss Breider) who did a power point presentation showing us the benefits of encouraging biodiversity on our schools campus.  The Wilsthorpe students had made masks of the beneficial bugs and animals on our campus and wore these for their presentation.

Following the presentation, Mrs Hallows explained that this term we are focusing on biodiversity.  Biodiversity means appreciating all the plants, insects, animals and marine life and how they are all dependent on each other and dependent on us to look after them.  On Green Day (June 14^th) we will be building a bug hotel in the Wildlife Garden to encourage beneficial insects and pollinators.  Classes have been asked to collect materials for this.  Mrs Golding has created a Biodiversity display in the Family Room with the by-line ‘Caring for all creatures’.

Last term the Year 2 students learnt about the rainforest.  They made a film based on The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry.   We held the premier of the film in our assembly.  There was much excitement!  The children had drawn the animation, filmed and edited, starred in and done the credits for the film.  It has been entered in to the Derbyshire film awards…the Daftas …and also the Coop Green Schools Revolution competition.

We finished assembly by singing our Eco song.  Hopefully the children started to understand what ‘biodiversity’  means and felt empowered to care.

Helen Hallows

Bird of the Day - Blackbird

I was joined by 4 girls from Class 4 today for birdwatching. As usual our first job was to refill the bird feeders which were empty - greedy birds!  We only had about 10 minutes but we saw a wood pigeon carrying twigs into the big fir tree building a nest. Bird of the Day was a beautiful male blackbird which perched on the hedge for us. All black apart from his orange beak - there are lots of pairs of blackbirds around school at the moment - I think they are collecting worms from the muddy ground. See if you can spot one or even better - hear them singing! 

Until next time

Mrs Longmoor