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This is a picture of fully grown yellow rattle, which will hopefully grow in early spring 2022. We also planted tulips, snowdrops and crocus bulbs to flower next year. We planted these in the garden and not in the field. Bulbs are highly toxic to sheep and other animals, including dogs. Liam, Rhys and Mackenzie took plant pots with bulbs home. Liam put his in a tray in the garden; Rhys put his on his outside window sill.

Michelle from Borders Forest Trust showed us how to use a search engine to identify the insects we found in the bug trays.

Today was the first day out for the S2 John Muir Group at Inverkeithing High. We have a couple of new faces, and a couple absent for the session. We have been learning about non native invasive species and the impact that they can have on the environment and indigenous plants. There are clumps of Montbretia growing in the woods in the school grounds, so today we started to remove it. The group split into two teams, and while one team dug out the plants by the roots, the other team had a walk through the woods litter picking, and keeping the place looking as it should. It's great to be back out in the fresh air, and helping keeping our school grounds looking great. We saw some great teamwork shown as everyone mucked in, and helped each other get the jobs done. We now have an S1 group running on a Tuesday too, they will have their page up and running next week, so you can follow what they are doing too!

After collect vegetables from the beautiful market garden and giving them a good wash we headed to the woods to peel and chop while we listened to the story of Stone Soup. We sat round the fire together to share our own delicious stone soup and discuss our favourite bits of the award so far.

It was very cold this week so we spent the afternoon around the fire experimenting with natural materials from around the site. Onion and carrot peelings saved from last weeks soup were used for natural dyes. We folded and tied squares of fabric to add to the dye and will open them next week to see if they have left beautiful patterns. We also collected and chopped pine needles to add to our dried rose petals to make deliciously scented melt and pour soap. We have left it in a safe place to set and can't wait to chop it up and all take a bar home.

We made graphs using the frequency tables we from our traffic surveys.

After our mini beast safari we used the data to make graphs of the different insects we found.

We had a brilliant time building dens! There had been a lot of strong winds that had blown branches off trees, so we could find lots of wood to build a frame. We used moss to add cladding to the outsides and keep them warm.