March – Foxes and Frogspawn
We often see foxes in our gardens and roads so we found out a few amazing facts about them & drew some nice pictures.
Three fox facts: Did you know that a fox can run at 30 mph? And its hearing is so good it can can hear a watch ticking at 40 metres away? And foxes use 28 different types of calls to communicate with each other?
Then we examined some fresh frogspawn. It was very gooey like soft jelly amd had little black spots like eyes.We drew it. Will it look the same when we come back next month? We went to see it in the Cat and Dog Pond and we saw a heron flying away. Maybe it had been eating the frogspawn.. There were lots of dead frogs lying about which maybe were worn out after laying all that frogspawn.
We looked at a pretty newt with an orange tummy and made drawings and models of it. Then it went back in its pond in Gill’s garden…
April – Flower Bombs and more Frogspawn
In April the flowers in the little wood near Harrow Road are a riot of blue and white comfrey and green alkanet.These are flowers which come out in early spring before the leaves on the trees emerge and make the ground under the trees too dark and shady for flowers.
We took apart some tulip flowers to find out what the bees are doing when they visit flowers. We found where the pollen is which the bees collect and we found next year’s seeds at the bottom of the flower which the bees pollinate.
Then we went a threw some flower bombs! These are clay pots which are full of wildflower seeds. You throw the pot, it breaks and the seeds scatter, and the pot dissolves in the rain later. We did a map of where we threw them so we can go and look in the summer and see if any thing grew.
We had another look at the mass of frogspawn wriggling madly in the Cat and Dog Pond. The jelly we saw in March has collapsed and the baby frogs now have bodies , heads, tails and gills to breathe through, but no arms or legs yet. We will look again in May to see what they do next!