As a class we decided that this term, we wanted to find out about living things in our environment .

This week our learning focus is ‘Mini-beasts’.  We decided that we could go outdoors to see what mini-beasts had habitats within the school grounds. Before going on our mini-beat hunt, we watched some clips on youtube and found out about the different families of mini-beasts. We learned that mini-beasts with 0 legs are called Annelids or Molluscs, ones with 6 legs are known as Insects, ones with a protective shell or different segments of body are called Crustaceans, mini-beasts with 8 legs are known as Arachnids and ones with too many legs to count are called Myriapods. These are tricky words to remember but we liked learning the real terms for the different invertebrate families and we had fun learning the words with Santa.

We made predictions about what mini-beasts we thought we would see on our hunt. Santa also though that we might find a centipede!Before we went outside, we got our clipboards and checklists ready so that we could record our results. We also took the key that Miss Yarrow had shown us, so that we could identify what mini-beasts we found. The key came from OPAL who provide citizen science resources. We might choose to send our results off to OPAL so that scientists can see what we discovered about mini-beasts in Sauchie.

We searched 3 different areas of the school grounds:

1. bushes and dry ground- here we found ants, beetles, flies and a worm

2. edge of the woods- here we found a snail shell (with no snail inside), a worm, a beetle and a golf ball 😉 Santa especially liked the huge worm!

Santa helped us check the key to help as identify and classify the mini-beasts. 

^Some of us were less keen on the worm than others!^

3. long, damp grass/undergrowth- here we found 2 spiders, a slug, a tiny snail and another beetle

Unfortunately, we didn’t find as many mini-beasts as we thought we would find. We had a discussion when we went back to class about why this might have been the case. Some of us thought that maybe it wasn’t hot or sunny enough, some thought that it maybe wasn’t damp enough on the ground and others thought that we weren’t looking in the right habitats. We will hopefully get to take Santa out again to see if we can show him some of the other mini-beasts that live in our country. This time, not all of our predictions weren’t right but we had fun having a go at guessing anyway!