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To protect our wild place we learned about the fable of the Greenman who is responsible for protecting the trees. Lorna gave each of us some clay and we made a protector for our trees so they will be healthy and grow for many years to come.

Lorna had hidden some interesting facts and quotes from John Muirs life around our green space. In pairs we had to work together to find and record as many facts as we could … we would not remove the sentences from the trees so it was a real test of memory and teamwork 🤔

We used some helpful flow chart cards to help us to identify the trees in our green space. We had to look at the bark, leaves and branches to help us plot what type of tree we had on our hands 🍃 🍁

Today Lorna brought with her some blindfolds, we get into pairs, popped on a blindfold and used our senses to explore the trees in this green space. 🌳

Over the last 21 weeks (April - September) we have walked nearly 65 miles over 52hours! We've had a lot of days that were too hot and also some super cold, rainy, foggy weather. Because of the (sometimes unbearably) hot weather we spent a lot of time trying to plan walks in woodland and this made it really clear to us how very sparse the tree cover in the Peak District is. We've come away from this award quite sad at the lack of nature in our natural spaces. We'd never questioned before the number of fields we walked through but now we saw that these fields meant no trees or shrubs etc for animals, birds and insects to live in. What we used to think of as great swathes of nature turned out to be really lacking in a lot of cases. We enjoyed learning new trees when we spotted them and when we were able to ID a bird on hearing it again (after Identifying it at home) we felt really proud. We found the tree side of things to be pretty easy because you can see trees really clearly and take photos if necessary. The birds were a different matter! Often quite small and sometimes invisible to us we tried to record them but were often thwarted by rain sounds, wind sounds, sounds from streams, sounds from traffic etc. Often when we got them home we realised most of our recordings were actually useless but we definitely learned the sound of the chiff chaff - our most heard bird call - and that of the wren when alarmed! Unfortunately we didn't manage our plan to record pollution levels because we couldn't get the necessary parts for our Raspberry Pi. Early on we had talked about litter and the fact that we noticed that a lot of litter is made up of plastic, and we had resolved to give up plastic as much as possible during this time. The things we've noticed we use plastic for at home are generally cleaning products and toiletries. We have found alternatives for our washing up liquid (now a bar), our stain remover (now a bar), our bathroom cleaner (now a bar), our shampoo (now a bar!)We also found a new deodorant (a cream in a glass jar) and we've tried various moisturisers. We've resolved to continue to try to cut plastic out of our lives as much as possible from now on but find the amount of plastic that comes home with our food shopping pretty depressing. Here is our final map, all filled in with all the trees and birds that we saw along the way:

We were making bughouses in the woods which was really fun and they were all really good because everyone was trying very hard and all of them looked amazing. Everyone split into either partners or threes to build them and some people had spider egg sacks and added them in and they will hatch into millions of baby spiders.

We were identifying leaves from the woods and doing leaf rubbings and also making a picture out of three of the leaves. It was very good fun and making the leaves into a rabbit was very popular.