In the hot seat

This week Lily-Rose and Oli have been in the hot seat as Grace Darling, reading her journal. They used some amazing words in their diaries, like perish and dreadful. Hopefully you will be able to hear a recording of them very soon! What questions would you ask them if you could?

What if?

What if a box arrived at school and what if it was from a museum? What could be in it? 

Should we open it? 

What if there were gloves in it? Why are they there? Should we put them on? 

What if the box contained a really old journal, that was written by Grace Darling's dad? Should we read it? 

  

Will we learn anything? 

An unusual place...

Somewhere in the world there is an unusual place. 

The room is circular and is roughly 6m across. Could you draw that using string and chalk?

In that place was a room and some stairs. They were unusual stairs. If you went up the stairs you came to a bedroom, with very little furniture. What could this place be? Who lived there? We had lots of great ideas.

Further up the stairs were more rooms. What was in them?

Somebody lived in this place, with their family. We were able to ask questions, but this person would only give yes/no answers. It took us a while to get the hang of it, but then we were on fire!

'Are you a boy?'     No

'Do you live here?'    Yes

'Do you have fun here?'  Yes, and no.

After a while ...

'Is it a lighthouse? Are you by the sea? Are you on the rocks?'

Yes

At night I light a candle and father finds oil.

 Why?

Outside the lighthouse a storm was brewing ...

then raging ...

into a full blown tempest.

The walls of the lighthouse were very strong. If they spoke, I wonder what they would say..

'The waves are crashing on the rocks.'

'I will stay strong.'

'The storm is terrifying ...'

'We will protect those inside!'

What questions do you want to ask now?

Bats!

It seems like we haven't just finished helping Billy with his problems, when another one occurs! WPIT employees got this email today. Oh dear!

We found the radio clip on iplayer. Oh dear, oh dear!

The bat experts at WPIT were indignant about Mrs Chomley-Spencer saying the bats were awful, horrible, black creatures and that they should be got rid of.  They wondered why the bats were there, then they remembered the training video and how bats eat up to 3000 insects a night!  We wondered whether there were lots of insects at Lady Chomley-Spencers and that might be why the bats were there. We needed to find out. 

Super night cameras

Then another message came, from Winnie. She was frantic! 

WPIT employees decided that they must do these things:

Take the posters down and put different ones up.

Find a way of letting Lady Chomley-Spencer and all the villagers know that bats are protected.

Let the villagers know that bats are not scary.

Let everyone know that bats will get rid of pesky insects.

Poor Old Billy!

Poor old Billy had an accident on his bike last night! He went out at night to look for some urban foxes, but fell off and hurt his wrist! Poor Billy! 

We weren't exactly sure how it happened, but we had some good ideas about why he might have fallen off . He might have hit a log in the road, been hit by a car, or knocked off his bike by a fox! He might not have been able to see where he was going if he didn't have lights on his bike and people would not have been able to see him if he was wearing black! We have made some posters with advice about how to be safe and be seen and we will send them to him. Billy needs to wear reflective clothing whilst on his bike and must put lights on it! To be seen in the daytime, he should wear fluorescent clothing. Don't forget to take our advice Billy! 

We have got some advice about nocturnal animals too ehilst you are waiting for our guide books!

Collaboration at WPIT

The WPIT employees have been working incredibly hard on their iBooks and guide books, ready to send to Backwoods Bill.

There was some amazing research to find some answers to the questions that none of our experts knew.

The WPIT employees took their work very seriously! Some notes were made and shared with colleagues. 

Nocturnal animal guide books

After coming up with ideas to help Backwoods Bill while he is in England, we worked together in small teams to produce guide books for him. Some teams created ibook guides, some created paper ones. They presented their work so far to the rest of the class. Great work so far - Billy will learn loads about our wildlife!

 

Planning to help Backwoods Billy

We thought about the best ways that we could help Backwoods Billy to capture nocturnal animals on camera and how we could pass the information on to him. These were our ideas.

Passing on information

Helping Bill find the animals

Owl cam update

WPIT now have two owl cams working! We are following their progress carefully click on their names to visit the owls. We love watching them!

Brenda and Boris

Dorset owls

Of course we can't have a post with birdcams and leave out are very own Peregrine Falcons at Norwich Cathedral!

Maybe you can find out what is living in the owl box here too?

Backwoods Belinda brings another problem!

It's been so busy down at WPIT and the team are hard at work putting together ibooks and guides about British nocturnal animals for Billy. Unfortunately, the blog posts of their lovely work and team presentations are stuck in cyber space... hopefully they will upload from the ipad at some point ...

Meanwhile, this afternoon, Backwoods Belinda bought a 'gift' from the woods where she was working with Backwoods Billy. She knew they were owl pellets, but needed the WPIT team to help her find out what they showed and what kinds of things the owls had been eating. That would help them identify the kinds of creatures in the woods. The team did a marvellous job and have written some reports for Bill to help him. There were lots of animal bones and skulls to study!

Bone identification

Backwoods Belinda inspects the pellets

The contents of a pellet

Inspecting carefully

Rodent skulls!

More WPIT news coming soon!