Teaching And Home Schooling Ideas

A few years ago we made a bug hotel. Materials Used Old wooden pallet Old clay tiles Clay pipes Twigs Straw Bricks Leaves Bamboo pieces from broken garden edging.  What to do Find an area in the garden big enough for your bug hotel. It can be as big or small as you like and the materials you use.  Gather all your materials together. Place the wooden pallet on the ground and fill compartments with bricks, clay pipes, leaves, twigs, straw and any materials you have that will make a good habitat for insects. We placed clay roof tiles on the top to cover the bug hotel and make it a darker habitat for the insects. 

Make birds from foil and kitchen roll. We have made a kingfisher and a robin.  You will need...  Foil Kitchen roll Felt tips or water colours Coloured card for beak and feet Glue Scissors Roll up some foil into a sausage shape and then shape into a bird shape.  Make one end the head and beak shape and one end the tail shape. On a piece of kitchen roll either felt tip or water colour paint the kitchen roll the colours of your chosen birds feathers.  If using watercolours wait for kitchen roll paper to dry and then tear up paper into small pieces.  Glue on the coloured pieces starting at the tail and working up the bird covering the foil.  The pieces can overlap and don't have to be completely glued down as this gives the impression of feathers. Cut out a diamond shape from coloured card for the beak and fold the diamond in half and glue in place. Cut out two black circles for the eyes and glue in place. Cut out leg and feet from coloured card and glue in pla...

Looking for Animal Tracks. We are lucky to live in the countryside and as we live on a farm we have fields to explore. Recently we managed to spot a number of animal tracks.  Next time you go for a walk in the countryside see if you can spot some animal tracks.  In the meantime, why not see if you can identify the animals we spotted from these photographs.  We'd love to know what you think. 

With the freezing temperatures at night we tried a fun nature activity. On our daily walk we collected some nature items eg leaves, berries, seed heads.  Just be careful if collecting with little ones as some berries, seeds and leaves could be poisonous.  We put them in a tub, then added water and a piece of string we had tied into a loop. Then we placed the tub outside over night to freeze.  This is a fun way to talk about what happens to water in cold/freezing temperatures and then what happens when the sun shines. Talk about water being a liquid and freezing to become a solid/ice when the temperature is below 0, then when heat/sunshine is applied the ice melts back to a liquid. In the morning we hung our ice decorations in the tree. They looked lovely shining in the sunlight as they melted.  We were inspired by mud and bloom on Instagram. 

Go on a nature hunt with the egg box challenge! Write/draw on top of the egg carton some objects to find on your nature hunt. Could be... Feather Acorn Pinecone Leaf - smooth edge leaf / serrated edge leaf Flower Petal Grass Soil Twig Stone Nut - walnut Shell Seeds Then hunt for the objects on the walk and collect them inside the egg box under the corresponding picture/word. Happy hunting!

Draw a tally chart of birds seen in the garden. After we made our bird feeder from a recycled milk carton we talked about the birds we might see and noted the birds that were using the feeder. (Mainly sparrows, blue tits and great tits.) We had a look through some bird books and listed birds we might see in the garden and that we have seen in the past. (Good reading exercise.) Then we drew a chart and picked out 7 birds from our list. Ask / Explain what tally marks are and how to represent 5. (Good for practising 5xtable.) Fill in the tally chart with the number of sightings.

We are lucky enough to have some tadpoles. We have been learning what we can feed them and how to look after them We have learnt about the life cycle of the frog. I printed off some pictures from twinkl of the different stages of a frog's life from laying eggs, leave eggs, frogspawn, tadpole, froglet to adult frog. We cut out and stuck the pictures and labels onto green paper cut into a lily pad shape. We drew arrows to show the life cycle order.

Go on an animal perspective walk. This was my attempt to make a walk up the lane more interesting to a nearly 8 year old boy! Imagine you are a countryside animal eg fox, bird, butterfly, mouse, hedgehog, bee etc Then take a walk imagining what are the treasures and troubles for the animal. Eg we chose the fox 🦊and talked about the treasures being... Our hens/chickens for food.  Grass is soft to walk on. Mud mound for a den. Field of crops or long grass for hiding when hunting.  Rabbits and hares, prey for food.  We talked about the troubles being...  Farmer/people that they might be frightened of. Gravel lane, could get stones stuck in paws and rough to walk on.  Sticky buds could get stuck in their fur.  Enjoy your walk and let us know what animal you were. 

The match box nature hunt challenge is see how many items you can get in your match box. We didn't have a match box so we used a small container. We did this last Summer but will definitely be doing it again. To make it fun both Thomas and I had a container. We went into the garden and down our farm lane. Alternatively you could play it indoors. We collected as many things as we could fit into the container. We laid the contents onto a sheet of white paper and counted the number of items collected. We collected over 20 items each. How many can you fit into a match box? Let us know.