Now that the weather is warmer and the April showers have passed we've noticed lots of 'bug' life in the paddock over the past weeks. Which of course meant it's time to do our annual bug hunt to understand bugs and what to expect from them, how they move, how many legs they have and how they change throughout their life cycle.

I started the session by asking the children to show me their kind hands, this involved smoothing my hand gently to show me that we understand how we hold or touch our bugs. I also spoke a lot more about our bug rule of "we must be careful with our bugs", giving the children scenarios such as if I see a bug what could I do with it? This is also a lovely way to build empathy amongst children and peers.

Once we started our hunt it didn't take long to come across some interesting finds; on one day it has been raining that morning which meant there were lots of slugs and snails on the path ahead. The children were really good at searching for the bugs straight away, we found lots before we had looked under our "bug shelters".

We have 2 aluminum sheets that have been led on the floor as a shelter for any bugs that want to hide. Under here we normally find our local slow worm, the children love finding it but we often call the slow worm a snake! Here we allowed the children to start handling the bugs, one of the main favourites were the woodlice. One child told me "he's tickling my hand", some children chose not to hold the bugs but we tried to encourage them to touch or stroke them.

After this we looked under some logs and planks of wood where we found hundreds of woodlice (or chucky pigs as I have always called them.) During the session the children showed so much enthusiasm when finding the bugs and I was amazed by the care factor that the children showed towards them.

Next week we will be continuing our bug hunt but using magnifying glasses to look at the detail of the bugs.

Thanks for reading,

Lauren