This bird hide is needed by the Imperial Army

We have been fortunate enough to have beautiful weather for every flexischooling Friday so far, and today was no exception. Ferdy has just finished doing the senses at school so we decided to go birdwatching/listening.

In the morning we downloaded an app with lots of different bird sounds on. I must confess to not being totally delighted about Ferdy's newfound ability to imitate a jay, a barn owl, a cuckoo and a nuthatch very, very loudly.

Seeing as he was feeling particularly vocal, we had a look at the diagraphs he has been learning this week (ie / ee / ea and e_e) and watched some phonics videos. We then wrote down words he could think of and categorised them under their spelling. He wanted to focus on words to do with birds and suggested cheep, tweet, tree sparrow, eagle, seagull. Oh and Pete...

Enough writing. Armed with 2 cameras, our new app, a bird guide and a notebook, off we went to the Attenborough Nature Centre, renowned for its over 250 bird species.

Drawing a duck

It's a bit of a drive so we are now on Volume 2 of Atticus the Storyteller's Greek Myths. Ferdy's current favourite is the story about Echo and Narcissus and has perfected his version of the Nymph's echoing voice 'Come over here, here, here'. Mine is the story of Tantalus; I love how some of our vocabulary is rooted in greek mythology.

On our arrival we heard a bird tantalisingly close to us (nice link H..) whose sound we couldn't identify and, with the help of the app, we worked out that it was a chaffinch. Ferdy was particularly excited that the chaffinch in the tree seemed to be chatting to the chaffinch noise on our app ('do you think that they are talking about Star Wars Mummy?').

tl clockwise: Ferdy takes a pic of a Speckled Wood butterfly; pointing out the wading birds we saw;
forgoing lunch for a large pile of books; playing in the mud kitchen.

We didn't see 250 species of bird, but we did hear a kingfisher (with help of our app), saw canada geese, mallards, swans, blackheaded gulls, crows, coots, robins, lapwings, a kestrel and were very excited to see the beginnings of a murmuration of (what we thought were) starlings. Ferdy then suggested we read some books and look up other migrating animals when we get home.

Watching the mini-murmuration

Can you see it?

As the day went on, sticks gradually became guns, bird hides became At-Ats and poor passers-by became Strormtroopers or Rebel Army. And Mum became Captain Phasma.

Apologies to those trying to watch the lapwings on the spit,
but this At-At is needed by the Imperial Army

The Centre has a great cafe with loads of wildlife games, books and information for kids, as well as a lovely garden at the back with a mud kitchen, bird feeders, bug hotels, pond and sand martin hide and we spent about an hour there (with coffee to help my transformation from Captain Phasma back to Mum).

When we got home, we looked up some videos of starling murmurations which we learnt are also called the Black Sun. We then got out some of our brilliant books (no library needed for these) on migration: Amazing Animal Journeys (which inspired us to look up videos on wildebeest migration, the red crabs on Christmas Island and the golden jellyfish on Palau); on birds: the RSPB book on Garden Birds, and a bird book with sounds (not that we needed them as Ferdy was able to do them very, very loudly). One of the things Ferdy loves most about Fridays is that we read at least 5 books together.

Relevantly (!) Ferdy then read to Billy (who is home by 3pm on a Friday) some of a book about dinosaurs. And we also did some division by sharing, which I think we should try with groups of starlings but we started with satsumas.

8 divided by 2 = 4

Our day was packed; we often start at 8am and finish at earliest 4pm, and I am knackered by the end of it! These Fridays are becoming quite special and unusual: they aren't like a weekend because we have a structure and theme to them and it's just Ferdy, Gil and I, and they aren't like the week because we aren't in the classroom (I'm no teacher!). But they are hard work and it's a challenge to find the right balance between doing some work and keeping up with what he's doing at school, and maintaining his interest and (most importantly), helping him to be happy.