Beavers Unleashed*

Our day about beavers began on Thursday evening when we rushed back from school to watch a second pair of beavers being released by Derbyshire Wildlife Trust at Willington Wetlands.

The next morning (after our spellings, handwriting practice and maths), we gathered information to help us go and spot the beavers. With videos, we watched them building dams, living in lodges, gnawing bark and tending to their kits, and learnt how their reintroduction can help to reduce flooding, improve water quality and help create habitats for other animals. Using our map of all the rivers in the UK, we searched for the Trent and also used this as an opportunity to refresh Ferdy's river and lakes topic using vocab like springs and meander and source and look at where rivers start and how they eventually flow downhill into the sea ('because of Isaac Newton, Mummy').

Ferdy's been learning about character description at school and Gil's been doing adjectives so, in preparation for our writing later, our next task was to brainstorm all the adjectives and other vocab we had amassed relating to Eurasian beavers.

Spot Mum's typo...

Armed with binoculars, camouflage trousers and sandwiches, we set off to find these elusive, ecosystem engineers.

It was a long and muddy walk down a track, but we had read to search for evidence of them such as gnawed bark and branches, footprints and poo. Obviously, we saw all these things... Ferdy must have seen about 73 beavers including those from the Narnia books.

Gil is sure he saw a beaver in the water; he has the sharpest eyes of all and there was definitely something swimming around so we have decided to return at dusk one evening and try again.

Later on, Ferdy wrote a beautiful character description of these 'nocturnal, silent mammals', and Gil wrote a newspaper report by Ripoter Gil about the 'very, very, very, very dirty' beaver he saw and how Mummy 3/4 believed him.

*Gil's headline title is influenced by Dogman.