Our Week in the Forest...
We were all very excited to welcome back our sessional day children after the holidays and for our first day back at Kew. The children were itching to get to the forest and start exploring! We headed straight for the woodland walk and had so much fun finding all the bug hotels, talking about what insects might be living inside, learning the names of the trees around us and how to recognise them by their leaves.
The children were delighted by the presence of a film crew on Tuesday, who were collecting footage for a promotional video. Some of them were more interested in how the camera worked then being filmed. This delighted the cameraman, who showed the children how to look through the viewfinder and adjust the lens to magnify what they were looking at.
We have enjoyed lots of adventure walks around the gardens this week, as there have been some wonderful changes brought on by the warmer weather. On Tuesday, we found four baby coots had hatched! We watched as their parents went back and forth from the nest feeding them with food they had found on the bottom of the lake. We also fed the ducks bird seed and named all the different birds that we found: Egyptian geese, Canadian geese, coots, moorhens, mallards and swans (I think we managed to tick everything off!). We also had a lucky sighting of a terrapin on the bank enjoying the sunshine.
The children really wanted to revisit the coots later in the week so we made our way to the bridge to say hello. Unfortunately, they were not in the nest and the children were convinced that mummy bird had taken them for a swimming lesson. They wanted to wait to see if the coots would come back, but as it was too hot and sunny, we decided to sit in the shade where we could still see the pond. In the shade, we found a great climbing tree which had lots of strong branches for us to climb! The tree provided great sun protection because of its large leaves.
Our interest in bugs has been renewed this week and many a log has been turned over to reveal a delicacy of bugs below. After doing some research we were able to identify the differences between centipedes and millipedes and even recognise a western yellow centipede. We have found different slugs including the leopard slug and hundreds of worms and wood lice. Using our magnifying lenses, we were able to take a closer look at our finds and share them with our friends.
We are really looking forward to more of the glorious sunshine in the weeks to come!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick