Basil’s Bug Hotels

We spent two school days in October exploring our love for God’s common home through our Laudato Si days, following Pope Francis’ call to the world. We learnt all about how damage is being done to the environment and our Earth, and more importantly what we can do about it. We each made pledges during a prayer space activity of what we would like to do to help in our future. We also carried out a nature hunt around our school grounds, finding signs of ‘hidden nature’ that we would not ordinarily notice. Before we worked on our bug hotels, we learnt about the different materials and habitats that would be suitable for each type of insect and understood what we would be making would help them to thrive over winter.

Across two school days our whole school family played a part in creating our bug hotels. We put on our wellies and outdoor clothing and got muddy and messy! Firstly our Year 6s helped to stack the pallets into structures that would be stable before setting to work with the saws to cut down all of the donated branches and bamboo that our community had given us. Then they helped out our youngest children in Year 1 and 2 to create bamboo habitats and leaf litter filled pipes. Our Year 3,4 and 5 children also joined by creating paper straw bee habitats, pine cone walls and pine needle brushes for lace wing butterflies. We managed to create 4 bug hotels across our two days (including a tiny ‘Bug-ingham Palace’ with our EYFS pupils) but we have plans for much more this school year!

After our Laudato Si work, we are now working with our local community to develop more of our school grounds, to look after our world and promote natural wildlife. We have created posters based on what we learnt and to encourage people in our community to come and join us in the spring for our next project.