Winter Grounds Day was another fantastic affair and the sun shone making it perfect for some hard labour and learning outside.There were various jobs for us all - from general ones helping to look after our beautiful grounds and some of the expensive equipment within it such as the camera obscura through to sketching and identifying the plants in the Jurassic Bed which links to our science learning on evolution. So we washed and scrubbed, brushed and carried, picked and sketched.
It was good to see everyone bringing in their outdoor shoes, and this enabled us to make sure everyone could get outside and access all of the activities.
We also helped Year 1 with their learning. Part of the Year 1 curriculum is to learn about the different habitats around the grounds so a log pile was built using the logs which had been recently left behind by the tree surgeons. Together with Year 1 we moved all of the logs to inside the Fairy Area and stacked them according to size and shape. Year 1 really appreciated the help and the muscle power of Year 6!
Miss Moreton helped us with the Jurassic Bed, and we started to look closely at the difference between the leaves of native English trees such as oak, sycamore and horse chestnut, and junipers and pines. We looked really carefully at the Cycad. These plants grow very slowly and can live a long time with some specimens being a 1000 years old. They have changed very little from Jurassic times unlike many other plants - sycamore leaves have five distinct lobes which have become wider over time. Fossils of Cycads have been found and dated to the Jurassic Period which is 300–325 million years ago. In particular they were so widespread during the Jurassic Period it is sometimes known as the Age of the Cycads.
A sycamore leaf now on the left.
On the right a fossil of a sycamore leaf which was found in Utah, USA about 60 million years ago.
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| This fossil was found in Germany |
We also compared pine cones in the grounds with fossil pine cones from the Carboniferous period 310 million years ago.Within our grounds we also have two Gingko biloba trees which are very special indeed. The Ginkgo or maidenhair tree is the only living species in the division Ginkgophyta, with all others being extinct. It is found in fossils dating back 270 million years. Unfortunately as it is a deciduous tree it has lost its leaves, but we will be back out there in the spring to study them. Next week we will be looking at the bark and twigs of some of these plants to help us identify them when they are bare.
