Wilder School - Include Lowestoft

We began the day with a short assembly to all the children, introducing them to Wilder Schools and finding out a bit about what they know about wildlife.

We then worked with each class separately, firstly the younger class, who used tape measures to do some outdoors maths, measuring the school grounds, finding out how much grass there is and how long the hedges are, giving us a baseline measure of the habitats present in the school grounds.

The older class participated in a nature connection survey, which included some thought-provoking statements about their relationship with nature. They then drew pictures of how they perceive the school grounds in their current state, giving us some good ideas of what’s important to them in their outdoor space.

For our second session we spent time exploring the school grounds and discovering what wildlife is already making use of them.

We looked for animal signs, checking muddy patches for footprints, discovering worm casts and identifying some droppings- they were left by a Hedgehog!

We then looked through the bushes, nooks and crannies on the building and under the bark of the trees to see if we could find some minibeasts. There were woodlice aplenty, and lots of cobwebs, although the spiders themselves were hard to find, and we even caught a fly that was basking in the sun on the wall of the building.

We then got out the binoculars and did some bird watching, identifying gulls, magpies and crows as regular visitors.

Having established that some wildlife is already making use of the grounds, we started thinking about the potential to attract other wildlife, finding out about the needs of animals such as bees and frogs and exploring the grounds to see if we could make changes that would provide what they need.

We began our third session by taking some action for wildlife, by making simple bird feeders from lard and bird seed that we then hung up in the school grounds.

The children then got their thinking caps on and drew maps of the school grounds including the features that they would like to add to enhance the space for wildlife and for themselves.