Wonderful Wetland Wildlife Activities for children aged 5-7 years

WWT has a well-established and well-loved education programme that we run across the UK at our ten wetland sites. We’ve designed these short activities based on one of our school activities. We’ve made it to connect you and your family to the natural world and help you to work with your children to feel great about nature and understand some of the things that WWT love and care about.

Why wetlands? WWT works across the UK to save, conserve and build wetlands for wildlife and people. Wetlands are one of the most important habitats on earth – storing huge amounts of CO2, providing a natural way of stopping flooding and serving as a home for huge numbers of different creatures. This activity will help you and your children to learn about a range of wetland and the wetland places (habitats) they live in.

These activities link to the National Currcula for science in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Stuff you need: • Set of 20 wetland wildlife cards (see final pages of this document)

Note: Where you see a Q this indicates a question to ask your child Indoor activities (1 hour)

Wetlands are home to some amazing animals. This first activity will introduce you to some of these incredible creatures. • Take either all of the cards or a random selection of the cards depending on the age and ability of your child(ren). • Place them with the picture side face up.

Q Which animals can you name? • Turn them over to see if your child is correct. Don’t worry if they don’t know the names of all of the animals at this stage. You can simply turn over the remaining cards to reveal their names. Repeating this activity is a good way of helping your child to get to know the name of some of these animals. • Place the cards picture side up again. Get your child to sort in any way they like (e.g. can fly / can’t fly; has legs / doesn’t have legs).

1 Q How have you decided to sort them? At this stage there is no right answer. It’s just to get the idea that animals (and plants) can be classified or grouped in different ways. Again, this can be repeated multiple times if you wish. • Lay out just the following cards: , eel, frog, toad, coot, kingfisher, water vole, otter, grass snake. • Read through the following information together, explaining that these can be put into the following groups:

Key word: AMPHIBIAN - Amphibians spend part of their time in water and part of their time on land. - They are cold blooded: They need to sit in the sun to raise their body temperature or move to a colder place to cool down. - They have moist skin and most can breathe through their skin. - They are born in water (usually in the form of eggs know as ‘spawn’).

Key word: BIRD - Birds have feathers (no other animals have true feathers). - They lay eggs with a hard shell. - Most (but not all) birds can fly.

Key word: FISH - Fish live in water. - They breathe through gills instead of lungs. This means they can take oxygen straight out of the water and don’t need to come to the surface for air.. - They are cold blooded. - They have scales.

Key word: MAMMAL - Mammals have hair or fur. - They are warm-blooded. This means that they can keep the temperature inside them the same even when it is very hot or very cold. - They give birth to live young. - Mothers feed their young with milk.

Key word: REPTILE - Reptiles are cold blooded. - They have scales. - They are born on land. - They breathe through lungs.

• Ask your child to split the cards into these five different groups. Keep back any they are unsure of. Turn them over to find out if they are correct. • Go back to those your child wasn’t sure of. Turn them over to see which group they fit into. Discuss why they fit into this group and not another. • Get your child to describe the similarities and differences between the groups using the names of different body parts (e.g. have legs / don’t have legs; have wings / don’t have wings etc).

2 • Play ‘guess the ’. - Lay out all of the cards. - Get your child to choose one of the animals on the cards without telling you (they shouldn’t pick it up - leave it with the other cards). - Ask your child a yes / no question about their animal (e.g. Does it have fur? Can it fly?). - Once they have answered, remove all of the animals that are now ruled out (e.g. if you ask has it got fur and they say yes, you can remove all of the animals that don’t have fur). - Keep asking questions and removing cards until you only have one card left. - Is this the animal your child chose? - Now swap over so that you choose an animal and they have to guess which you have chosen.

Take it outside: (30 minutes)

• Go to a place outdoors.

Q What animals can you see? Which group do they come into (mammal, amphibian, fish etc)? How do you know? • Ask your child to use the notes and sketches pages to think about some of their favourite animals – can they show what they love about them using drawings, words or maybe even a poem? • Get your child to think about why these are their favourite.

Q What is it that you love about these animals? How does watching them make you feel? Are they beautiful? Can you imagine what they might be thinking right now?

Q What could we do to help protect these animals?

3 Wetland wildlife cards • To make the cards, cut the line across the width of your paper then fold each half in half again so you end up with a picture on one side and the information on the other. Stick the two sides together with glue.

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