Dashwood Community School, Banbury

Pupils monitoring wildlife in their playing field.

Year three pupils at Dashwood Community School started their week with two days of biodiversity workshops with Chris from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, an expert in creepy crawlies and Emma from the University of Oxford Botanic Garden, extremely knowledgeable in all things green.

Chris and Emma started by introducing the children to a wide selection of mini beasts and teaching them about the importance of biodiversity and maintaining habitats. Soon the class was out in their playing fields looking for plants and animals. Although they had discovered an abundance of wildlife, Chris and Emma were keen to increase these numbers, which they were planned to do by building a ‘biodiversity hotspot’ or as the children liked to call it a ‘Bug Hotel’ to be positioned in their playing field.

On the second day of workshops building on the ‘Bug Hotel’ began. The class was split into two groups, the first with Chris, who started creating comfortable rooms for their mini-beasts. These were made by placing clay into the bottom of a flowerpot and inserting varying sized sticks of bamboo, ideal hidey-holes for insects. The group also made fat balls, with pinecones, lard and seeds to take home and hang in their gardens for the birds.

Meanwhile, Emma was creating mini meadows with her group, to help attract bees and insects. She had brought a selection of seeds from the University of Oxford Botanic Garden, which were planted into small pots and labeled for each of them to take home. They also created further rooms for the ‘Bug Hotel’ by stuffing flowerpots full of straw.

Towards the end of the day, everyone rushed to the front of the school, where Chris and Emma had stacked some pallets one on top of the other, creating shelves and crevices. The pupils placed their mini-beast rooms into these shelves and filled all the gaps with dried twigs and leaves. The hotel was finished with a turf roof, and a row of plants that would attract bees. Everyone was incredibly happy with there creation; especially the local wildlife, and Emma explained that she and Chris would return in the summer to see who had moved in!