This year, at Michael Drayton Junior, I wanted to try to get the whole school to engage in the RSPB Big Schools' Birdwatch. I really wanted all the children (and staff)) to learn about the birds that visit our school and also to start to foster an early love of nature and and their local wildlife.
Working with each year group, we created a series of feeding stations around the whole school so pupils could watch from their classrooms.
The children were very excited and, with materials I had provided for the classes, many created little bird watching areas and tally and checklists for the pupils. I created a series of activities on my website to help pupils and staff learn to recognise 6 (Level 1), 12 (level 2) and 16 (Level 3) common birds. They could practise their skills on my website and this information was also passed onto parents.
Children started to get involved in lots of different activities and watched my live cameras to practise their skills.
Some classes had the whole class able to ID 6 birds, half 12 birds and a third, the full 16.... and numbers are rising! Here are some of them with their postcard certificates! 1 certificate means they can identify 6 birds, 2 means 12 birds and 3 certificates means a massive 16!
We were building up to our Bird Mastermind! This is where two pupils from each of the 20 classes would represent their class and compete to be the Bird Mastermind 2022.
There was lots of excitement as we went into the hall, ready for our competition!
The pupils took part as I ran the quiz I had created. They worked with their partner to decide on the answers...
How well would YOU do? Lots of quite tough questions...
Click HERE for my Birdwatch page, quizzes and an answer sheet
We then swapped papers and we added up the scores.
This gave us class duo winners, Cameron and Raph in Year 5. Now it was the time to for the decider questions... who would be the overall winner and win one of the amazing prizes! A massive thank you to CJWildlife who donated some lovely ID charts for those who took part.
It was time for the big announcement! Who was going to be crowned 'Bird Mastermind 2022?
A massive congratulations to Cameron! Raph was only 1 point behind, so it was a really close call! They lost only 3 points in the whole quiz! Great ornithologists of the future.
Runners up were in Year 3!
A massive well done to all the pupils who took part and to all the pupils at school who took time to try to earn their Bird ID certificates. This will continue up until Easter.
I really hope that some of these children will take this growing love of birds into adulthood. I have been delighted in how engaged they have all become and how enthusiastic they have been about learning to ID so many species. What a complete joy and privilege to help these young people on their journey to learning more about our wonderful wildlife!