Another Wildwood maths trail

It's the summer holidays again! Woo, hoo!

We started ours with a maths trail at the wildlife park, Wildwood again. I can't believe it is a whole year since I posted about the last one. The questions were quite similar to the last one, with HM working out how long the journey there took, how fast I was going (60 mph) and how far would we get in half an hour. At the entrance she had to work out the cost for a family of four and then what the saving would be if the special family ticket was purchased.

Henry's questions involved recording times, speed, money etc. They both had to record the numbers of adders, wolves and rats seen and construct a bar graph to show the info. HM had to construct a pie chart also.

This is the beaver dam. They are huge (asleep in their burrows ) but Hope had been waiting all this time to see her favourite animals... the baby ducklings!

I intend to do a lot more of this sort of thing over the next six weeks.

Another wildlife visit

Yesterday we went to Wildwood, the wildlife park where we are members. It looks after British species of wildlife, past and present. One of their most fascinating species is the adder, Britain's only venomous snake. Here is one that we saw basking in the warm, spring sunshine.


They have three species of deer there, too: roe, red and fallow. Here are the children getting hands-on experience of the deers' antlers.


But the best bit of all is the picnic!

The Wildwood Maths Trail.

As today was an INSET day (teacher training day), the school summer holidays start here!
Honor has declared that she wants to improve her maths and is committed to practising over the break, so....


We are members of a local wildlife park called Wildwood at Herne. It is a fabulous place, dedicated to the conservation of British wildlife. I prepared 'maths trails' for the children to practise the skills they have covered over the past year at school. Honor has just finished year 4 so her questions involved calculating entrance fees using addition and multiplication, decimals and subtraction (working out the change for a family of 5 from £40). "Gosh, that's a lot of money!" she exclaimed. "Yes", I replied. "Good job we have membership!".
Then she went to the toilets and did some percentage calculations in there! (And spent a penny - hee, hee!)

She also collected statistics on some of the animals to practise converting measurements in cm and grammes into decimals and to compare later using different sorting strategies ie carroll and venn diagrams and also made a tally of the three different types of deer that she saw to later record on a bar chart. She is really into bar graphs at the moment!

She has also been learning about postion and direction and finds it hard to remember angle turns and clockwise/anti-clockwise, so we did a bit of this too. Facing these deer faces she had to make a 180 degree turn clockwise and record the name she could see in front of her. (It was Jeremy, a plaque on a tree marked the place where I think a beloved animal may be buried.)

Henry has just finished Reception year and his questions were brief and simple counting, addition and subtraction. I got him practising reading as much of the stuff we passed as possible, too.

They enjoyed doing their 'work'. But the park was probably the best bit. Especially as we bumped into some other of their friends on a day out .

I love this wooden dragonfly that Hope is sitting on.