Year 5 Trips
VISIT TO 'CONKER'S, NATIONAL PARK - SPRING 2010
DAY 1
We climbed on the coach at 9:30 am and drove to the Youth Hostel. We were put into dormitories and unpacked our stuff. We then made our beds. All of that took 45 minutes. We then had a packed lunch and set off to Conkers. For the first activity we were split up into two groups. One group went off to the assault course which was very big and the other group went orienteering. We then swapped over. Then we went back to the Youth Hostel and had some lessons on the history of the Youth Hostel Association and some explanation of what the area was once used for.

RENEWABLE RESOURCES STUDY VISIT - SPRING 2010
When we got to the Sewage Works we saw a film with a little cartoon character called Captain Splosh and learnt the safety rules before putting on our fluorescent jackets. When we got outside it started to smell a bit. First we saw raw sewage floating along, I saw lots of poo and rubbish floating down the pipes, it was disgusting. All the rubbish that wasn’t meant to be there was sucked up by things called screens. Then it comes through tubes that squeeze it and get all the water out and it falls out the end into a skip that then gets emptied into a landfill site. We went to the storm tanks, they store all the water from a down pour of rain so that the other one doesn’t overflow. We saw two big tall round tubs and in them was water that still had small pieces of sewage in so they put it in with micro-organisms that
like to live on sewage. They then put air bubbles in to liven the micro-organisms up. It makes them eat the living bacteria and then the water gets a bit cleaner, but it still wasn’t clean enough so we had to go to the next cleaning process. This process smelt disgusting. There was water with lots of yucky stuff on the top. There was a big sweeper arm, the tanks were 2.5m deep and the arm goes all the way round sweeping all the yucky stuff off and takes it away to put in the sludge tanks. In the next tanks, the water is finally clean. There’s a final sweep around and then it’s put into a green tank where there are test tubes to check that the water is clean and safe to send back to the river. Flora England 5C
VISIT TO 'CONKERS', NATIONAL FOREST - SPRING 2009
Conkers is part of the National Forest which is a place where people plant new trees to try and make one big forest. In 1982 it used to be just 6% but now it is 18% trees! The aim of the National Forest is to increase the amount of trees to 30-40%!