Monday 20th September 2021

LO: I can identify a range of habitats and microhabitats

Today we explored habitats – describing a habitat as ‘a type of place that an animal or plant lives’ and explored the ‘habitat’ of our meadow. We identified quickly that within this habitat, there were a range of microhabitats, such as:

• short, cut grass
• meadow
• mud under logs and rocks
• paths
• hedgerows

We talked as a group and agreed that we were most likely to find wildlife in the meadow, dark places under rocks and logs, and hedgerows, as they were darker and more protected from people and animals, so we decided to look in these places for invertebrates. We quickly identified a range of creepy crawlies, using classification charts to help us identify the ones we were not familiar with. We practices our recording skills to, recording each mini-beast we identified in a table, which we will analyse next lesson.

Toward the end of the lesson, we uncovered something we couldn’t identify, and the children were fascinated by it, so we stopped what we were doing and went to research this mysterious creature inside!

We suspected it was either a queen ant, a moth ‘caterpillar’ or a larva. After a bit of research we discovered it was a Maybug Larva and that they have a three year life cycle – excitingly, these larva were due to pupate and hatch in October! Watch this space as we find out more about the Maybug next lesson! We might even make some light traps to catch and safely observe them!

Here is a picture we found of an adult May bug – we can’t wait to find out what its strange furry ‘glasses’ are for!