Tuesday 25 September 2012

WOW! Club in print!

I am delighted to announce that the Woodland Trust liked our WOW! Club hedgehog house that we made last year so much they they have turned it into one of the Wildlife Detective Activities! These get mailed out to all the members! How super that lots of children will see what we have done in Water Orton! We will be making some more of these with the new WOW! Club... why don't you set up a home for a hedgehog in your garden????


You can find out more about the Wood Trust Nature Detectives at http://www.naturedetectives.org.uk/ and see our page advertised here: http://www.naturedetectives.org.uk/club/kit/packs.htm

A new WOW! Club begins!

My, how time flies and I'm afraid with all the exciting events that happened to me last term, my WOW! Club blog was rather neglected. A new term has started and we are all raring to go and ready for lots of great activities and wildlifey fun!

My WOW! (Water Orton Wildlife) Club runs for an hour after school on a weekly basis and I always have lots of kids interested. As I run the club on my own and we do lots of practical activities, I tend to limit the group to about ten children as then everyone can be involved. This current group will work with me up until Christmas, then the next keen recruits will start after Christmas, with a final group in the summer term. I always hate having to turn keen children away, but I hope the slot they do in my WOW! Club will be enough to initiate and fire their interest in wildlife... enough for them to join a local Watch Group or RSPB group to pursue their interests further.

The first thing we did when we got together was to talk about what we, as a group wanted to achieve between now and Christmas. I wrote down the first one... to get ur bird feeding station up and running properly again. We will be building a new structure for our feeders in the next month or so with our caretaker's help, but for now, we needed to get the feeders in, clean them and fill them.

The group then discussed and came up with lots of other ideas of things they would like to do. Many of them follow my website at www.wildlifekate.co.uk and have seen some of the things I do at home. They wanted to have a go at making a waterhole out of old tyres, so we will do that! Not sure we will be able to achieve everything on their list..... but we'll see what we can do!


 We decided to start with the bird feeders... it was a horrid day outside and we could clean them and fill them up inside. First, we looked at some different types of food and each had a look at all the different kinds of seeds in a commercially bought mixed bird seed. We talked about how feeding different foods in different ways can attract lots of species....







Next we gave out bird feeders a good clean... that meant taking them all apart.....






 Then came the fun bit... filling them all back up... everyone wanted to have a go at pouring in the seed....












 Soon, we were all ready to hang them outside to see what we could attract!



We will be developing this feeding station over the coming weeks and keeping a record of all the birds we see.... I have told this group I want them all to be able to identify at least ten common garden species by Christmas!