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Titchwell Enquiry Skills

Posted on 1st Aug 2026

On Monday 6 July we went to RSPB Titchwell, near Hunstanton. First, we walked through a woodland habitat and saw a blackbird, wood pigeons, and a collared dove. Then we went into the marsh habitat, where we went into a bird hide and saw an oystercatcher, greylag geese, and avocets. Next, we went to the beach and saw black-headed gulls diving into the sea to catch fish. We also found petrified wood and ate our lunch in the sand dunes. When we walked back, we saw damselflies and dragonflies in the reeds. At the end, we saw a marsh harrier hovering high above the grass fields.

We learnt about the outbreak of cholera on Tuesday and how John Snow found out where it was coming from in 1854. Using maps, he soon found out a pump was causing people to die after drinking from it. He figured it out by seeing and marking on his map all the deaths which were all clustered up in the area around the pump. He eventually got the pump's handle blocked and then the cases fell and every death came to a halt. This is epidemiology. We even did our own research in a pretend case, to find out that a mouldy sandwich in HU3 caused a zombie outbreak in school.

Wednesday, we were learning about biodiversity, which is life in a specific area. We went outside to site around the school grounds, and with a water and soil test meter we found out the moisture and pH level in the ground in 8 areas. Then we counted the number of plants and insects in the areas, we used the quadrat to help us. We also used the tree fishing net to catch bugs in trees and found a big shield bug in one tree. We found out the ground was very dry and it was made up of sandy loam.

Thursday was all about Microclimates. We looked around the school site to find out the wind speed and temperature. We blew bubbles to find out the wind direction and shockingly at the back of food tech and humanities there was a wind spial. The hottest heat spot was around the Snack Shack, one of the benches was 60C! The fastest wind speeds were on open sites heading away from the buildings and onto the fields.

We wrapped up the week designing reflective poster of what we had learnt. We shared these with members of the leadership team who came to talk to us about what adventures we had been on. Overall we had a brilliant time getting to improve our enquiry skills.

Written by F Moss