Bug Week at Footsteps: Mini Adventures With Our Mini-beast Friends

Footsteps are situated in fantastic surroundings which allow us to offer our children access to Forest School, allotments and wide open spaces for running and playing.  By the very nature of the environment, we are often joined by various creepy crawlies.  This is to the great delight of the children.

Last week we celebrated our outdoor friends with bug week.  We were fortunate enough to have visits from both Zoolab at Chalfont and a Magnificent Minibeasts experience at Aylesbury. The children absolutely loved handling a wide variety of animals from snakes and spiders to mice, snails and giant centipedes.  It was fantastic to see their confidence and we were impressed with the number of questions we had.

As well as our external visitors we also incorporated our bug theme into our arts and crafts with bug biscuits and paintings.  This supplemented our other activities which included creating bug hotels from pallets and other materials, releasing snails into the garden and looking at bugs in glass blocks and in books during our show and tell sessions.

At Aylesbury we were also lucky enough to see our caterpillars go through the transformation process from chrysalis to butterflies.  The children were absolutely fascinated and we talked animatedly about the transformation and about the types of plants that they were attracted to in our surrounding area.

We had an absolutely fantastic week and the children showed a real interest in the topic and a real appreciation for the environment around us.