PACE
By Norman

On the 27th of March Year 6 did Streamwatch and a Waterbug survey. The two people from Streamwatch, David and Alison came along as well.

Firstly they introduced themselves. Then they showed us some of the the instruments that they we were going to use. David and Alison handed us a sheet and we had to complete it. We had to identify the waterbugs. Alison handed us a little insects preserved in a little rectangular glass prism.

We grabbed our recess and our drinks and left school ready to test the local creek. We walked along to Brookvale Creek and that was were we did our Waterbug Survey. We took our equipment in a car.

We were divided into groups then headed to the ponds in the creek with our groups. When we caught some bugs and put it into a container. We searched for 20 minutes.

Our group found some, freshwater snails, Caddisfly larvae and True Bugs.
We had to sort them out from the buckets into ice-cube trays. David came to each group and recorded our findings. The water at Brookvale Creek was fair. We could tell this by the sensitive bugs we found. We think the bugs have been badly affected by the drought.

The excursion was fun apart from walking to and back to school.

By Stella

Every year, Year 6 do a Waterbug survey.

First Alison and David came and trained us. We learnt how to catch bugs. We got an activity sheet and we had to figure out which bug was which, we looked at bugs that were inside labelled glass cases.

Later on, we walked to Brookvale Creek and scooped for different bugs, the most common bugs that we could find was the true bug and the freshwater snail.

We scooped the bugs from the creek and put them in a ice-cream tub. Later David gave us all a scooping spoon and a ice cube tray to sort our bugs into groups. David tallied all the bugs up onto a graph. Before we left we carefully returned the bugs to the creek.

We got back to school after lunch. I had a good day.

By Stefan

On the 27th March Year 6 did an Autumn Waterbug Survey and Streamwatch. Two people from Streamwatch named David and Alison, came with our class.

After they introduced themselves they showed us all the instruments we were going to use. Then they handed out a waterbug survey sheet that we had to complete. When everybody got a sheet they handed out insects that where each in a little glass rectangular prism and our job was to go around to the other tables and match up the insects and write their proper name under the picture of that waterbug on our sheet.

Once we did that we got our recess, grabbed our drinks and headed for Brookvale Creek. 

When we got to Brookvale Creek we went to one of the ponds to catch insects for twenty minutes with scoop nets. The group that I was in caught a lot of freshwater snails and we even found some shredded skin!

Finally, when the twenty minutes was up we went back up to tables to look at all of the bugs we caught. We went to other groups to look at what they caught. David came to every group to count how many bugs we caught, for our group he estimated about one hundred.

When we finished that we went to another part of the creek to test the water there for Streamwatch. I had a great and fun day and I can't wait till next term when we do it again.

Back in class, Mr Taylor sent our results to the Waterbug website for them to analyse.