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We are P 5 at Newlands Primary school and we are starting our John Muir Discovery Award. Last year we did the RSPB silver challenge, and now we are looking forward to discovering our local woodlands.

We have a safe walk to the woods from the back of the school playing field. Over the Summer wild flowers and sunflowers have grown along the path, and we can see butterflies and bees. The nice man who allows us to pass across his land keeps chickens, they sometimes wander about freely, but are mostly kept in a very big enclosed area to keep them safe.

We made posters with instructions explaining how to stay safe in the woods.

We wrote all the rules that we follow in the woods and made them into colourful posters to go on the wall.

We have been learning about different types of angles, so we went to see how many we could find in the woods. We discovered that Right angles tended to be on man made things that had been put there - like the ladder and metal stand. Tree branches, leaves and shrubbery were mostly acute/obtuse angles. nature doesn't like straight lines!

We were listening - with our eyes closed - to sounds in the woods. We heard sounds like birds cheeping, leaves rustling, footsteps crackling, wind blowing and cars driving by.

In the woods this week we have been doing directional language. We went in groups to direct each other around the area using angles. We had a load of fun, some even closed their eyes as they trusted their partners so much! We have used angles such as 90 degrees 180 degrees 270 degrees and all the way to a 360. We were directing each other to trees, dens and lots more!

3 miles 4pm - 5.30pm. We thought it might be nice to finish with a local circuit that we walk a lot - but use our new IDing skills while we were on it. We realised fairly early on that it was slightly unfair on the countryside places we'd been to because there are quite a number of different street trees which have been planted deliberately near to us so that some of our more 'natural' walks actually fair pretty badly in comparison to out inner city walk! It was warm and sunny though so we enjoyed our short stroll and learnt a little more about our local area. The trees we saw were: Ash, Sycamore, Lime, Cherry, Rowan, Birch, Field Maple, Beech, Willow, Hazel, Elder, Hawthorn, Bird Cherry, Goat Willow, Holly, Horse Chestnut, Oak and Sweet Chestnut. We also ID'd a type of locust tree - possibly a Honey Locust tree - in a park we walked through. We finally identified a tree that is on our 'patch' (that we used for our first John Muir) that we have now seen through every season and seen it's leaves, flowers and berries. It was the berries that finally allowed us to identify it as a Portugese laurel! We also saw some flowers which were tufted vetch and morning glory.