I was invited into my great-granddaughters’ nursery class at a forest school. The topic was mini beasts, with a passing nod to the idea of habitats.
As my great-granddaughters call me Gramps to distinguish me from their grandfathers, it was decided by the class that everyone would call me Gramps.
With that issue settled, we began by thinking about what it’s like to be a beast, such as an elephant or a lion. After waving our arms like trunks, roaring, and pawing the air, we turned our attention to mini beasts. What was it like to be a spider or a beetle? After a few mimes, we decided to go into the forest area to find some real mini beasts.
I took my outdoor scientist’s backpack, and when the children were settled on their circle of logs, I opened it and took out a trowel and a white enamel tray. We dug up some soil, put it in the tray, shook it up, and looked for moving mini beasts. We found plenty of earthworms of different sizes and three beetle larvae, which looked a bit like caterpillars.
Next, we wondered if there were any mini beasts moving around on the ground, so we set up two pitfall traps—one in open ground and one in a bank of leaves. It was agreed that the next day, the teacher would photograph any mini beasts caught in the traps, show them to the children, then release the animals and take up the traps until my next visit.
Back in the classroom, we revised the idea of habitats by watching my Habitats video in the Ways into Science series, which you can find on this website. True to my commitment to taking science education across the world, the video is about rainforests, and I appear to fly between the continents to find them.
The children have asked Gramps back again when the tree leaves are out to look for more mini beasts.
You can find the Habitats video in the section on Science books and videos for primary schools, along with details about the outdoor scientist’s backpack and how to make a pitfall trap in my Teaching Primary Science: Revised Edition.
