Wildlife Wednesday: 30 Days Wild Challenge – Days 8-14

The 30 Days Wild challenge for the Wildlife Trusts has been continuing this week in the Baby Routes household. After all the activity of our first week, it’s been another busy wildlife week here with nocturnal garden explorations, making plaster casts of deer tracks and some pond-dipping and microscope action. There’s also been plenty of smaller activities going on and Roo has been filling in some more of her nature book when she’s had the chance.

One of the quick and easy activities Roo most enjoyed this weekend was making up nature poems to go in her nature book.  She even had a go at writing a few lines by hand herself (the rest yours truly got to transcribe)!

After inspecting what was going on outdoors with her little sister, we perched near the pond and Roo got thinking about frogs. The resulting poem was a lot better than I thought it might be, given it was her very first attempt ever at making one up. More importantly it seemed to really focus her mind on observing nature – I was surprised how much detail she wanted to include.

Since then, Roo’s been making nature ‘poems’ up non-stop – butterflies, trees, ants, clouds…you name it, our poet-in-residence has probably had something vaguely lyrical to say about it!

Here are a few snippets from her one and original ‘Froggy’ poem (believe me…there are a LOT of verses in the full one):

Froggy can hop,

Froggy can leap,

Froggy can get wet,

 Froggy can peak.

Froggy is green, 

Froggy is brown, 

Froggy is black, 

Froggy is smooth.’

Froggy can swim up to the surface,

Froggy can bounce up through the weed,

And if you come up very quickly

Froggy will swim down.

I like watching froggies

go out of the water and wait until night.

When I go into the house for dinner,

Froggy bounces out of the the pond for a party.

I only wish I could write up our activities as fast as we are getting through them. I’m on it…but for now you’ll have to make do with the pics below and this ‘How to’ guide from our animal track plaster casts adventure!

The only activity we don’t have photos of this week is Day 14 – playing the ‘nature moving game’. This is just as simple as it sounds – watch nature, choose something to pretend to be and act it out.It’s perfect for preschoolers, and can be adapted into ‘nature charades’ for slightly older children. We were having too much fun, yours truly included, to remember to photograph it though!

Week 3 of the 30 Days Wild Challenge will see us head off on our travels again, this time to Northumberland. We will be spending plenty of time outdoors and look forward to sharing our latest random acts of wildness with you again next week.

What have you been doing this week that has got you outside and into nature? I’d love to hear all your ideas! You can see what some other great nature bloggers are up to on the 30 Days Wild Challenge over on the blogger website here.