Bee homes and butterfly feeders

10th May 2023

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Cedars and Larches have been working hard this half term to look after nature.
Yesterday lunchtime some of the children helped Mrs Smith to put the bat boxes up on their chosen trees. We had a look at them this morning and thought that they looked brilliant… We hope that the bats will really enjoy roosting  in them
 
This week we worked on making a difference to and helping out bees and butterflies. 
We made two sorts of homes for solitary bees-firstly a home made of wood, which we made holes in using different types of hand drills and palm drills. The bees will enjoy crawling into the holes to rest. The second type was made by using secateurs to cut up bamboo canes into smaller sections – again the bees will enjoy crawling inside these. We cut a plastic bottle in half and popped the canes inside, packed  tightly together, then hung it up.
 
We also used the secateurs to cut small pieces of elder. Elder sticks are very special because once cut,  you can push its very soft pith out of the centre of the sticks. These make great beads…and we used these to decorate the strings, holding up our butterfly feeders. again, these were hung in the forest school garden.
Watching and caring for our forest school birds has become a very popular activity with both classes so this week we added a different type of birdfeeder to our repertoire!
 
And as always…had a lot of fun investigating together and playing games. This afternoon Larches learnt to play a listening and hiding game called “123 where are you?” They absolutely loved it! And found some brilliant places to hide, getting better each time at shouting the reply of “123 i’m here”