Our Year One children had fantastic fun learning all about hedgehogs recently. A huge thank you to Woodmancote Parish Council who made a donation to our school to enable us to participate in the Hedgehog Highway project. We used this to purchase some hedgehog houses or hibernacula! These will help Woodmancote hedgehogs have a safe place to hide and hibernate over the winter and shelter in the other months.
To begin our research, we watched a video about hedgehogs and where they like to live and discussed where the houses should go. We then took the houses out, on a very rainy day and found cosy places under the hedges on the field and in forest school. We are going back to fill the houses with hay, leaves and straw to make them cosy.
Back in class we painted our own hedgehogs, made a hedgehog out of handprints and labelled parts of a hedgehog. We even sang the hedgehog song – Let’s roll into a prickly hedgehog ball!
We are now all hedgehog experts. Did you know they have spines made of the same material as human nails? We also found out that each hedgehog has around 7,000 spines!
Once hedgehogs come out of hibernation we plan to put food and plenty of water out for them. We also hope that we may be able to out a wildlife camera so that we can watch the hedgehogs accessing the new houses.
