This week’s theme:
The Mysteries of Animal Habitats
Fact of the day:
The woodland floor has habitats hidden underground. Badgers are in their setts, rabbits in their holes, and foxes in their dens.
Resources list:
A messy bed!; badger poem; Youtube; tubes, cardboard boxes, sellotape, tinfoil ball, yoghurt pots.
Activity 1:
Badgers live in a network of underground burrows and tunnels know as a sett. Each badger territory will include a main sett and several smaller outlying setts. Setts tend to be located in the shelter of woodland, with the badgers emerging at night to forage in fields and meadows. Badgers clean out their sleeping areas, dragging out old hay, bracken, grass and anything they’ve used as bedding by carrying it under their chin. This prevents a build-up of fleas and lice. Can you clean out your sleeping space by making your bed today using only your chin? Give it a go!
Activity 2:
Explore this badger poem and add actions and movements for certain words.
Try acting the poem out, can you lay like a docile badger; shimmer and shimmy like the moonlight; snuffle like a badger’s snout; waddle with your tummy close to the ground; watch and be aware of dangers, and other things mentioned in the poem?
Activity 3:
Learn the Makaton signs for Woodland animals, see here.
Activity 4:
A Fox makes its home by digging an underground burrow called a ‘Den’ or an ‘Earth’. These Dens are dug-out tunnels that have rooms for the fox and its family to live in, they provide a cool area to sleep, a good location to store food and a safe place to have their pups. With toilet and kitchen roll tubes and cardboard boxes you could make your own tunnel system for a paper or foil ‘fox’ ball to travel down to its bed. See here for an example. You could time how long it takes to reach each bed, do more joined tubes make it a longer journey to bed?
Activity 5:
A fox’s Den has several exits so that they can flee if a predator enters the burrow. Try finding the exit in a maze game (to play online, or to download & print off) here.
Activity 6:
Try tip-toeing and slinking slyly like a lithe fox, swishing your brush-like tail, or burrowing with your paws in time to a song from Fantastic Mr Fox.