Monday, 22 September 2014

All done

Lessons are over. Close your books. Pencil cases away. Now go outside and eat you picnic lunch in the glorious sunshine.

For some, the excitement is all a little to much ...

This has been a brilliant trip and the Juniper Hall tutors have complimented us on the behaviour of the Beambletue Year 8s. 
We will be writing up what we have discovered in the next week.


Award time

Time to award some prizes. 


We awarded prizes for "stars of the weekend". Some were chosen by Brambletye staff and others by staff from the centre. 



It pays to have a tidy dorm! The only dorm to get 10/10 . 





Run off results

The results are in! We used a new method of data presentation - a human bar chart. This can be seen below:


As you can see the grass had the longest reaction time.

Other guests

Great to see the Y8 geographers from Windlesham and their Head of Geography who have come here to Juniper Hall to study the River Tillingbourne for the day.

Looking at run off

We will be investigating the speed of run off on different surfaces.

First we need to form our hypothesis... 


Then we made it rain...


And measured how much water collected into the "river" every 30 seconds.


We made sure to record all of our results.


Each group was investigating a different surface. We looked at Tarmac, soil, grass and gravel. Results to follow! 




Even more lessons

After some glorious bacon, hash browns and beans and the all-important game of football, we settled down for another lesson: this time on hydrology.

Question for the day: How does urban land use affect hydrology? 

Morning has broken

Today the children were awoken by Mr Miller's rendition of "Monet is Broken" in full operatic voice. The audience was captive but less than appreciative of this early morning performance. 
First jobs this morning: get dressed, strip bags, pack beds ... Or something like that ...



Sunday, 21 September 2014

Number Crunching Time

After supper (oriental pork with fried rice followed by banoffee pie!) we played a little footy and then it was time to crunch all of the data that we have collected today and see if our hypotheses were true or false.






Pips the bank vole

Group 1 also managed to catch three bank voles. 

Here is a picture of "Pips".

More Voles ...

Just before supper we checked our traps and group 2 managed to catch another three voles ...

And we released them ... Below Dumbledore makes his exit...







More rivers

Measuring the river further downstream.



River study

This afternoon we visited two locations along the river. 

We learnt lots of new ways to collect data. 


This included the gradient,


flow velocity, 


width,


and wetted perimeter. 


Now time for some cake before we return to the classroom to analyse our data.





Lunch al fresco



The recumbent sandwich ...

The sandwich disaster ...






Rivers 1

Before leaving we had the dorm tidiness awards (much improved on yesterday which was won by the Rhinos) which was won by the Lemurs just ahead of the Squirrels and the Meerkats: The Moose still have some work to do!

And now, after a short lesson on rivers and the River Tillingbourne we have made our way, avoiding the many Lycra clad cyclists (45 in 5 minutes; giving us a rate of 9 per minute! Thank you Peter), to our first site.

A short walk to the first site.

Here we learned how to use the equipment ...







Releasing time ...

Weasely went Daigon Ally and slowly.

Ronaldo ran for cover with Cheryl hot on his tail ...



Now we reset the traps to compare diurnal and nocturnal animals.

Interestingly trap cameras have caught crows attacking the traps to try and get to the tasty seeds and meally worms therein. 






Catch of the day

Last night we set some small mammal traps. 


When we checked the traps this morning we had a few false alarms. 

One group found a rather large slug...


..and then three lucky groups found wood mice. The children did a great job identifying the mammals we caught, using a key they made in the classroom this morning. 






Once we had identified and observed the mice we set them free. Goodbye Brian!


The traps have now been reset so hopefully we can find some diurnal mammals while we are out today.