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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.

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

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 !!!!

Today the group took an amazing trip to see the wildlife photographer of the the year exhibition at the natural history museum ,it was truly awesome !The winner was Yongqing Bao who took the amazing picture above of a Tibetan fox pouncing on a startled Marmot in China's Qilin Mountains We also looked at some exhibits about natural disasters - our next igse topic .

Today we visited Cloybank which is a local conservation area in our local community. We explored the area to increase our awareness and understanding of conservation. We were also looking for inspiration for our own development area.