Lorton Meadows

On Wednesday 13th June, a beautiful sunny day, Sharks class accompanied Seahorses class on a trip to Lorton Meadows in Weymouth.

Our first activity was tree identifying, where we went into the wooded area with our identification sheets to see if we could identify the trees around us. We then split off into our smaller groups to find a tree to identify, draw and do some bark rubbing.

Our second activity was pond dipping. We took it in turns to dip our nets into the pond and then we tipped out what we had found into a large tray full of water.

Being very careful we scooped up any individual insects and placed them into a pot of there own where we used magnifying glasses to take a closer look and identify them on our sheets.

One of our groups managed to find a Great Diving Water Beetle, it was the first adult that had been found this year and the centre took it off in a pot to study it further!

Our final activity was mini beast hunting. First we went into the meadows to do some meadow sweeping. We took our nets and swept around the long meadow grass, then we tipped up what we had caught into a plastic tray. We then carefully picked out mini beasts and put them into magnified pots to have a closer look and identify them.

Then we went back to the wooded area to do some tree shaking. We held a large square net underneath a branch of a tree and shook the branch gently to see what mini beasts would fall onto our nets. Then we carefully put them into our identification pots to have a closer look.