What's for dinner?

My two boys are always asking me what animals eat, and who eats who. They love all the apex predators like T-Rex and great white sharks and crocodiles and seem to be totally unfazed by videos of Komodo dragons eating buffalo and lions devouring zebras.

And we have recently been learning about and listening to a lot about friendship so I thought it would be good to counter this with looking at the food chain and animal 'enemies'. Ferdy loved the BBC bitesize video and we learnt a little about simple food chains before we set off on the train to the Sea Life Centre to look for some of the different links in a food chain.

We've been fortunate enough to see two different types of penguins in the last couple of weeks: Humbolt penguins (from Chile) and Gentoo penguins (from Antarctica). We were also on the hunt for sharks (both boys), seahorses (Gil), plesiosaurs (Ferdy), clown fish (Gil), eels (Ferdy), seals (me), rays (Ferdy) and we found them all. The only thing we couldn't find was krill or shrimp which was at the bottom of our food chain worksheet. Oh and there was a dearth of plesiosaurs.

Most exciting was seeing the two seals: Boo and Pippa being fed fish (2nd on our food chain eaten by 3rd on our food chain) and Ferdy and Gil even managed to watch from within a glass box right in the heart of the seal tank.

Boo catches a fish

We seem to be unable to visit Birmingham without a stop off at the magnificent Central library so after completing our worksheets over lunch, and a few rides on the escalators we managed to spend a happy hour reading. Good books included: Bob's Best Friend Ever; Little Red; Harry & Hopper and The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon. It struck me that many children's books are primarily about friendship or predation.

Later on Ferdy wrote about food chains and then drew his own: algae, eaten by mosquito larvae, eaten by a mosquito larvae eating fish, eaten by a heron, eaten by an alligator. 

The State of Nature

On the day that a State of Nature report has been published showing that 15 per cent of our species are under threat of extinction and 41 per cent in decline since 1970, it seemed right to spend it outdoors appreciating and learning about the wildlife that we have left, and, as we always try to do on Fridays, thinking about what we can do to protect our wildlife.

Ferdy had also suggested we learn about hibernation (because the Moomins hibernate), although his suggestion that we practise hibernation by staying in bed all day was not one that I took up.

After attending harvest festival at school, we headed straight out to our local forestry centre, with The Wind in the Willows as our soundtrack.

We looked for evidence of animals and found rabbit holes, verified by Ferdy who found the rabbit poo nearby. Scattered all around the centre are wooden sculptures of animals and when we saw (or rode) on one, we discussed what it does in the winter. Ferdy thought that badgers hibernate because in Peter Rabbit on CBeebies Tommy Brock (the badger) is always having a nap, but Billy later told us they don't, they just sleep more (like us..).

A huge amount of time was spent in the bird hide, where we spotted squirrels gathering nuts (they don't hibernate) and a plethora of birds including nuthatches and long tailed tits. There is also an extensive guide to birds in the hide and we played a brill game where one of us had to say a bird and the others race to point to it. Even Gil could play if I told him the first letter. It was a bit noisy though and we didn't see many more real birds afterwards.

Our final task at the centre was to collect conkers; rollies (very round ones for good rolling), and cheek strokers (flat edged ones for stroking on your cheek).

This large bag of conkers was then used back at home to play a game learning about greater than and less than.

For Ferdy's writing today he wrote a letter to a new penfriend I have set up for him: Luna who lives in Spain and is the daughter of one of my friends (she speaks English, although it's a good incentive to learn a bit of Spanish). He even wrote some questions with question marks...

One of our few mammals that do actually hibernate is the poor hedgehog, I say poor because their species has declined by 95 per cent since 1970. We felt really sad about this; they feature in many of the books we read, but Ferdy and Gil may never see a real one.

Reading Wide-awake Hedgehog to us

A tremendous thing

Ferdy and Gil are really good friends. I'm not sure how long it will stay like this but currently, although they do argue, they seem simply to like each other and enjoy one another's company. They don't compete much, perhaps because Ferdy isn't very competitive (he is actually happy when Gil wins a race), perhaps because they have different skills. It also helps that they both love Star Wars.

Both boys really like Fridays because they have an extra day together; Gil has started to join in more with the work that we do and I'm sure his enthusiasm for it is rubbing off on Ferdy.

Ferdy doing some maths and Gil writing Meerkat and Lemur

Ferdy's learning about animals and their habitats at school at the moment so after some maths (Ferdy) and practising writing meerkat and lemur (Gil), we studied some other animals we were going to be meeting today at Peak Wildlife Park.

Gil suggested that we listen to the rest of Charlotte's Web on the way as it's also about animals, I hesitantly agreed. Hesitantly, because I needed clear vision for the drive and it's nearly at the bit which makes me need to brush something out of my eye... (spoiler alert: when Charlotte is left to die).

tl clockwise: No warty pigs; watching the Humbolt penguins; stroking his new wallaby friend;
reading about wild animals; being followed by pygmy goats; reading about the maneless zebra

The advantage of torrential rain is that we get places to ourselves, we are able to chat to the keepers and we really get to know and interact with the animals. The disadvantage is that quite a few animals don't want to be outside. We didn't see the warty pigs or the mainless zebras, and the lemurs only reluctantly sidled out of their hut for a bit of food (carrots). But the wallabies seemed quite content in the rain and even let Ferdy stroke them; we learnt that they like eating grass, leaves and shoelaces. And the pygmy goats in the African Village were impervious to the muddy puddles and happy to be herded by and follow around a cheeky little six year old.

We even got our own private talk from one of the keepers about the meerkats and what they eat (grubs, crickets, mice and carrots), where they live and why they are sandy coloured. Ferdy then gave the zookeeper a talk about when Andy of Andy's Safari Adventures met meerkats and what a meerkat alarm call sounds like, and Gil gave a little talk about his own camouflage trousers and how he wears them in the forest but not in the grass because they don't work there. I was a little tired at this point so opted not to give a talk.

All the information we'd gathered about where our new animal friends originate from was easily recorded on worksheets, diligently prepared by Mum, in the cafe later. And I couldn't argue with Ferdy when he wrote 'child' in the space for an animal found in the UK.

As well as being about animals, today was about making animal friends, and human friends, and being friends, and crying about book friends, and learning about friendship which, as Charlotte says, is a tremendous thing.

Never hurry and never worry

There are spiders everywhere at the moment; their webs are adorning our windows and decorating our drainpipes. They are building intricate web bridges around our garden gate, which means we don't dare open it.

Our new friend the garden cross spider

We love spiders, so when we started our new home ed forest school this week we were pleased to hear that the focus was going to be on these eight legged creatures. Before we left we thought about and retold stories we knew about spiders which included one of Ferdy's favourites about Arachne and Gil's Eric Carle's The Very Busy Spider. In addition to this we learnt about Anansi the Spider, a hero of West African folklore who is a renowned storyteller and trickster and often outwits those more powerful than him with cunning and guile.

It was a bit of a drive so we decided to start listening to one of my favourite books about another ingenious spider, Charlotte's Web, on the way.

The forest school is set in an old orchard within an organic farm and there were activities galore. After exploring the woods, we learnt about all the different types of spiders we can find and went on a picture hunt, ticking them all off.

Other tasks included: climbing trees, searching for spiders' webs, making mud cakes, creating a spider from pine cones, relaxing in hammocks, swinging in hammocks, making friends, gathering firewood, making popcorn on the campfire and building complicated inventions from ropes and then breaking them.

Our favourite spider of the day, however, was probably Charlotte of Charlotte's Web. One of the many knowledgable things she says to Wilbur the pig, is that he should never hurry and never worry. We have been doing rather a lot of hurrying and worrying recently, so it seemed right to take a little of the wise arachnid's advice on this beautiful, autumnal day.

We've Got Dragons

We've got dragons in our house at the moment.

Ferdy has been complaining of tummy ache, and he's been a bit unhappy about friendships within school. He's also had a headache and sore throat, and been ill over the weekend so perhaps it's all been a bit too much. Apparently some of these things can be called dragons; something we learnt by going to You've got Dragons on Sunday which is a play about a little girl who has to learn to live with her dragons (a swirly tummy, anxiety, feeling prickly) by not ignoring or running away from them.

So on Friday we embraced our dragons.

We put together a pile of books about dragons and read them all.

We sang along to Puff the Magic Dragon more times than I care to mention.

We made Lego dragons.

Ferdy did some written comprehension questions about How to Break A Dragon's Heart.

We learnt about Komodo dragons, and watched a video about a Komodo dragon fighting a snake (Gil: 'why is a baddie fighting a baddie?').

In fact, the only thing that didn't involve a dragon was some numberwork games looking at tens and ones.

The Duplo blocks are our tens, and the Lego squares, our ones

Perhaps by staying at home, and not putting too much pressure on ourselves, and reading lots of books together, and making some time for chats, and having lots of cuddles, we may have also embraced our metaphorical dragons.

©Taking Flight Theatre Company

Famous (kind of)

Our flexischooling journey is in the news..

It's in the Oct/Nov issue of The Green Parent magazine available in WH Smith (but only the very big ones and slightly hidden in the baby section).

Ferdy's response to this? Oh no Mummy I hope there won't be lots of reporters on our doorstep asking for an interview...

I don't think we need to worry about that quite yet.

Jumping Day

If Ferdy had his way, he would spend every minute of every day listening to audiobooks and reading books (I didn't know it was possible to do them simultaneously but reading The Beano whilst listening to C.S Lewis's The Horse and His Boy actually is a doddle) in his playroom.

So, when Ferdy requested that we have a jumping day for his first flexischooling day this term, I leapt (yes, I know..) at the chance of him doing some physical exercise, and suggested going trampolining.

tl-br: watching the safety video; only Ferdy finds a way to have a nap in a
trampoline park; doing a BFG leap; coming down the slide.

There's no real explanation needed for trampolining other than it's something that we can all do together and we had a a lot of fun pretending to be the BFG and having Ninja fights.

As it was a jumping day, we managed to get into a Jumping Clay session in the afternoon. And because we are all still obsessed with the How to Train Your Dragon books (yes, me too - when it's my turn to choose what we listen to in the car I no longer chose Radio 4 but How to Fight a Dragon's Fury. It is sooooo exciting. And (spoiler alert), both Ferdy and I actually cried when one of the characters died in Book 11), Ferdy made a model of sweet little Toothless.

We did a lot of reading over the summer so it's no problem getting Ferdy to read now, but doing writing and numberwork (we have an agreement that we read a book or a chapter of a book, write something and do some numberwork every Friday) had to be approached more gently. Ferdy decided to write about Billy William the Third in Mr Gum (his audiobook that day), and to count in 10s up to 100 and write them down.

Sometimes writing under no pressure and amongst a lot of mess
seems to be the best way.

Our flexischooling year began with a bounce on our bottoms, creativity with our fingertips and a character study of a dirty butcher (Andy Stanton's words, not mine)... Not a bad start!