Way back in about November I sent off for a load of free stuff from the RSPB.We’d done the Climate Action Awards one afternoon and I’d found details of the Wildlife Action Awards too so in with the free stuff I ordered the manual for that. It’s been sat around ever since waiting for me to have a proper look through it.
So this morning, as another day of not a lot stretched ahead of us I dug it out and read through it, then sat and read through it again with the children. Basically it is split into 4 sections and you have to choose at least one activity from each section each time. I think there are 22 activities in all and you need to do 6 for the bronze award, another 6 for the silver and a further 6 for the gold, so 18 in total. They are all fairly involved and require some sort of ‘evidence’ of having completed them by way of pictures, report and so on.
We’ve been through and chosen 18 to do in total and then I split them into 3 lots to ensure there was variety in each task to work through. The plan is to take it slowly and keep it enjoyable, I don’t at any stage want it to feel like work, boring or ‘for the sake of it’. Loads of it, infact pretty much all is stuff we already do: recycling, composting, feeding the birds, creating a wildlife pond so a lot of it is going to be labour intensive in terms of creating some sort of evidence that we are doing it. I could easily do it all for them in the role of ‘teacher’ but that is not really the aim.
I’ve split it so that there is a mix of activities to do, at least one big task in each group of six and it won’t all be sitting down doing writing. Some of it is really cool such as make a display about wildlife so I will book display space at the library for them for that. There is also things like ‘write to your MP’ which Davies has been wanting to do for a while about the alleyways near us and the state of them, ‘get in the paper’ where they suggest a big wildlife friendly event that you send a press release to the local paper and hope they cover – I’m aiming to tie those in together with ‘litter collecting’ and we’ll go armed with bin bags and gloves and collect all the litter from the alleys ourselves, hope for the local paper to cover it and write to the MP about it all at the same time. Both the children have more than a bit of ‘eco warrier’ about them anyway so this is feeding into their passions nicely.
So today we started with birdwatching once we’d gone through and planned which activities they are going to do. The requirement was to sketch any birds you saw on a birdwatching session and then try to identify them from a bird book. Our chosen joining gift from the RSPB last year was a British birds book- RSPB Handbook of British Birds
In the tree outside our window we have a pair of nesting wood pigeons. I had thought they were collared doves but careful identification from the children with the book showed them to be wood pigeons. They both drew a picture of them and we watched them for a while darting in and out of the tree and up to the lampost where they landed and canoodled for a while :).
Tarly did a really good one – she often draws birds anyway so it took the form of her standard bird and then she coloured it according to the pigeons colourings. She didn’t need any help with forming the letters and Davies read them out to her from the book.
She then decided to go a gull that we could see gliding about too and we decided was a Herring Gull. Again she drew it and just had the letters dictated to her:
She wasn’t completely happy with the size of the head in relation to the body but she’d done the body in relation to the wood pigeon and ran out of room for a head in proportion. 😆
Davies’ took a slightly different form as he tried to draw it while watching them dart around and he said afterwards he wasn’t that happy with it’s shape, particularly it’s head. I drew one aswell and he and I spent quite a bit of time discussing colour blending and shading and he used some different techniques on his to try and get irridescence and feather effects. He then wrote ‘wood pigeon’ from memory, after he’d closed the book up and spelt it out to himself as he went 😯 He even stopped to say ‘that spells PIG’ and then ‘now it says PIGE’ as he did it. He then decided he wanted to label it to show how we’d indentified it (I had labelled mine) and he wrote ‘green and white collar’ with very minimal help from me (I agreed after he suggested each letter for green and told him he needed the h in white but he worked out he needed an e at the end to make the i an i all by himself.). He then wanted to write ‘yellow beak’ but found yellow in the book on a yellow legged gull we’d been looking at and just checked with me the spelling of beak as he thought it would be ‘beek’.
He seems to have exploded into literacy suddenly and read a text message on my phone pretty much entirely earlier this week and is doing lots of sounding things out and helping Scarlett with reading and writing stuff on her DS. Clearly I could go on about this for four pages of blogposts but suffice to say it is amazing to watch, even more amazing to see how it all seems to have really clicked and how much he is enjoying it :).
We’ve decided to try and spot, draw and identify five birds (should be easy, we see various gulls, starlings, tits, blackbirds and robins in our garden regularly) and then create a dossier of them to send in for completing that task.
The other task we are considering done, and is worth double points, is creating a wildlife pond as we have already done that at the allotment. We looked through the pictures we already have of before and after and will take some more along with a bucket of existing pondwater to transfer some microlife in and some pond plants (all raided from Grandad’s pond, maybe this weekend) and then write up a bit about it all.
That alone puts them halfway towards their bronze 🙂
All of this took no more that about an hour and a half but there we were, sat at the table, pens in hand learning stuff and doing spelling and writing and it all felt very dangerously as though there should be one of those world maps above our heads. The table hasn’t yet become a crap magnet (empty as I type :)) but it does seem to have brought in some sort of tabley education with it, curse it 😉 😆
I’d casually said to my Mum that we’d be home today if she wanted to come over and have me finish her CV for her but didn’t really expect her to. But she rang late morning to check it would be okay and brought some lunch over with her. So while the children got back to the serious business of DSing – current favourite games are Left or Right: Ambidextrous Challenge (Nintendo DS)
I cooked the kids’ tea – toad in the hole. They both were not keen on the sausages – decent ones with herbs in and suggested they would like it with frankfurters next time. Personally the idea sounds revolting to me but if they think they’ll like it I’m happy to give it a go for them. Davies did ask if I could make my own frankfurters but I said I thought it might be tricky! 😆 They got ready for Badgers, I plaited Tarly’s hair as there have been several comments about her hair from the leader (along with comments about them not wearing coats, having ‘minds of their own’ and other things which I am proud of them for but possibly make them stand out from the crowd ;)). Ady arrived home in time to come with us, handed over the freshly printed CVs to my Mum (oh the good daughter points I got for that :)) and we all left together.
Davies says he learnt about kitchen safety and washing your hands – so I’m guessing they covered health and hygiene today. Scarlett is making a pretend first aid box from paper so was telling us it was green with white crosses on it. Ady and I had a walk in the dark for the hour which was nice and we got him a Superman t shirt for £2 in Ethel Austin so now all four of us have one 🙂 – of course that probably proves Syndrome’s theory that when everyone is super, no one will be 😆
Home for toad in the hole for us and now I really must go to bed as I’ve got work in the morning.
Wow – go D, with the literacy, wonderful!
And ‘comments about hair’ you say? Nope, never had that, can’t imagine what you mean…
All sounds good stuff
rofl about the comments from Badgers. Was good to hear about the wildlife action awards as I think we’ll be sending off for stuff for that soon. Might do the climate ones first though as an intro to it all.
God, I’d be really pissed off if anyone made comments to me about my kids’ hair! Things must be a bit snobbier down on the coast 😉
Kirsty, would definitely recommend doing the climate one first, if for no other reason than some of the activiities on it can then be used as evidence for the wildlife action ones and it is much easier to complete (we were already doing pretty much all of it, from our chats about saving electricity I reckon you probably are too).
Re the hair, the bagder leader is lovely but a classroom assistant and very ‘teacher-y’. She knows we HE and I’m pretty sure she disapproves heartily without ever actually saying so.
Before Christmas D and S told me there was no point in them wearing coats to Badgers as they both hate wearing them in the car and take them off for the journey so they were getting out of the car outside badgers, putting them on to walk across the carpark and then going straight in and taking them off again, only to repeat the exercise at the end of the session. I agreed so they didn’t bother taking them after that. Then we had a session where we were going somewhere afterwards (fireworks I think) so they wore them that week and she said ‘Oh they do have coats then!’. I explained and she said ‘they are very strong minded your children aren’t they?’ To which I (obviously) replied ‘yep, that’s the way I love them!’ and she just raised her eyebrows at me.
We definitely stick out from the crowd there ;).
Oh, my lot have been the scruffiest at Girls Brigade for years, lol 🙂 But I have only ever had nice things said to me about them, and snide comments would really wind me up.
And lol, Buttercup seems to spend a lot of time carrying her coat around too – I keep telling her not to bother if she’s not going to wear it!
Lol, I insist on a coat being IN the car, even if not worn, after we both once had to walk home from Safeways with no coats in pissing rain when the car wouldn’t start. But, as you might expect from me, I also have a sleeping bag, space blanket and snacks in the boot in case of snow on my cross counrty travels.Iknow. Blush.