Thursday 29 August 2013

A trip out - Gibside

We met some home ed friends at Gibside, one of our favourite National Trust properties, today. Peter watched an excavator in the car park for a while with his friend.


We spent a couple of hours in the large adventure playground before Harry got bored, so we had ice cream and headed off in search of more adventure.


We spent a good while looking up at the trees with this sheet from Nature Detectives. We noticed recently that lots of trees now have seeds, so we tried to identify some. Gibside is a great place for this kind of activity as there is so much woodland and we actually saw most of them.



Harry had a good scramble around the low ropes course.


We found sticks and stones to throw into the river


And Harry actually spent over an hour pottering in the river - the water is crystal clear and shallow so it's a lovely place to let him have some freedom. This is one of his absolute favourite things to be doing and he didn't complain once about his soggy feet and shorts all the way back! He dragged sticks around and borrowed a bucket from a friend to use in the water. 


We walked very close to some cows with calves in the field on the way back to the car and saw a calf drinking milk from it's mother. Harry noticed that the mother cow was eating grass at the same time and said that 'she is doing that to make more milk for the next day'. Maybe he did learn something from all the hours I spent sitting around (and possibly eating at the same time!) feeding Peter as a baby.

Both boys were asleep very quickly tonight after a full day in the fresh air.

1 comment:

  1. It sounds as though you had a great day today in the fresh air as did we! The Nature Detectives stuff is great - we love it too. The mini beasts sheet was a hit for us a couple of weeks ago.

    Have a good day tomorrow.

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