We offer quality learning experiences for children.
We offer quality learning experiences for children.
On Thursday 30th October we joined a family workshop at the Gardener’s House to make our own bat boxes.
We would like to say an enormous thank you to Daisy and her team for such a warm welcome.
On our way to the workshop the children were commenting about how much of a windy day it was! One of the children said the wind was ticking their face which all of the children agreed with. We found lots of wonderful autumn items on our way such as acorns, sycamore seeds, red, orange and yellow leaves, and sticks with lichen on. We talked about collecting items off the floor and not picking them off plants. We talked about how the wind was blowing things on to the floor for us to find. When we got to the Gardener’s House we looked at all of our items we’d found before the workshop started.
After Sam and I visited the Gardener’s House, we shared the photographs with the children. One of the children excitedly said ‘can I go there?’ when they saw the curiosity wall and we said ‘Yes! We’re going tomorrow!” We were excited to see their reaction when we arrived, curiosity was definitely the word. The children went straight over to explore all of the items they could see and started asking questions.
Before the workshop started we washed our hands and enjoyed a snack offered by Daisy. The children tried ugly fruit for the same time (It’s absolutely delicious!) and also some very sweet and juicy comice pear along with a drink of water.
Daisy started the workshop by sharing some very interesting facts about bats. Did you know our most common local bat is a pipistrelle bat? Did you know they only weight as much as a 20p piece? We also learnt about echo location and their favourite bugs to eat!
The children then got stuck in to their bat box building. We were INCREDIBLY impressed at their ability to find the matching pieces to the instructions and then trying to balance all of the ladder rungs in the matching holes to build their bat ladder. It was particularly fiddly but they showed super perseverance and determination. One of the children absolutely flew through the instructions and Daisy asked if they liked to build lego at home which they excitedly replied YES to! It was clear to see they have super skills when it comes to following instructions and construction. They were finished and started painting whilst the adults were helping everyone else with their building!
There were a wide variety of options to decorate our bat boxes. The children chose to use the acrylic paints so we popped on our painting shirts and started to paint. The children chose their colours and made some lovely patterns and designs, carefully washing their brushes between choosing colours. They soon spotted the black paint which then covered some of these colours and created new effects. We also chose a drawing of a bat to cut out and add to our bat box, the children learnt about different breeds of bats such as greater and lesser horseshoe bats, grey long eared bats and pipistrelle bats.
Daisy kindly gave each of the children an envelope of wild seeds to plant near their bat boxes. We talked about the food chain that starts with the flowers, then the insects that are attracted to feed on the flowers and how the bats then eat the insects! The children were keen to take their bat boxes home for their gardens – I think we’ll be making more so that we can put them up in our nursery gardens too.