What wildlife lives in the grounds of your school/home/club? Do you provide any safe, comfortable homes for them? Wildlife homes can be a really attractive feature, and may also be a use for that neglected corner that you don’t quite know what to do with. They could also make an ideal project to do with your class or group, as you could fit it around several curriculum areas.
How about building a wildlife stack with some old bricks and tiles - a great opportunity to reuse some materials which might have otherwise gone to waste, whilst thinking about shape, proportion and balance. You could incorporate some natural materials such as pebbles and the odd herb plant to give your stack a bit of earthy texture.
Perhaps you could start a wildlife corner, and create some small individual wildlife stacks, maybe plant a few wild flowers and see how it develops over the course of a year. You could have daily or weekly class monitors to survey the wildlife and minibeasts that you attract - we'd love to hear about how it develops.
If you have a pond, why not try installing one of these frogitat homes? Your class could keep an eye on whether anybody moves in, and even create a 'home sweet home' sign.
You hould use this hogitat to attract some hedgehogs to your grounds - a good way to reinforce learning about living things and their environment, and would keep your hedgehogs very happy.
How about a good old-fashioned nestbox? You could integrate it into a technology project and get your students to design (and make) their own nestbox - we have instructions on our website. B&Q have launched a competition to design a bird box which would see the winning entry displayed in Kew Gardens.
This reminds me that I must clean out my birdbox at home, thanks. I built it at the start of this year and thought I was going to be a bit late to get anything nesting, but was then really pleased to have a couple of blue tits fledge.
A top tip for building them (that really helped me out) is to use a piece of old bicycle inner tube for the hinge on the lid – works a treat!