Making a Mini Beast House Part 2

 

For everyone who has been following this particular project you will know that as part of our Autumn topic we have been aiming to make a mini beast house.

 

We spent one day researching the different environments that they live in and then went off in search of the materials. Click here to find out more.

 

We then investigated the different designs available to make a unique house for our garden. Despite my lack of DIY skills, and with the help from the Boys, I made this structure below.

 



 

One of the best parts of this project is the low cost. All the materials can be found out on a nature walk as a previous post, and link above, shows. Then the making or the structure can be great for reusing wood. The final part is find material that can be recycled and upcycled:

 

We already had some cardboard tubes saved away in our craft box that we thought would make great tunnels and hide a ways for different creatures.

 

One thing we found in our investigation is the use of bricks, slate and pottery. Again, if looking hard enough you may find these around your garden or from friends and family.

The next part then was to find a location, place our structure and fill it with the materials we found.

 

We had a corner free in the garden so William put some loose soil and compost down on the ground to be the thicker base of our structure. We actually visited a local garden centre and explained that we needed a little amount and what our project was. Luckily they gave us a carrier bag full of the above mixture.

With the base of our structure now resting on top of the soil the Boys decided to use one half with leaves and the other half with moss. William was keen on using the bricks on this level and filling those holes with moss too.

 

Once they were full we placed the next level of the structure on top.

 

The next level we used the cardboard tubes and the boys stuffed these with the straw that we found. On the other half of the level they stacked up the sticks and twigs that were collected.

 

The next level was then placed on top of the bottom.

 

For the third level we recycled some of our plastic bottles from the recycling and filled these with grass; we had four small bottles back to back on one side. On the other half we filled it with more bottles and some left over tubes and straw from the previous layer.

 

Once our final level was balanced on top the Boy's placed a mixture materials. They layered the base of it with left over soil and compost and placed stones, woodchip and grass, covering the whole layer.

 

They then used the broken pottery and again filled these with woodchip and stones.

 

With each level placed on top of each other and subsequently each space filled with a natural, recycled and upcycled materials our mini beast house was finished.

 

 

The Boys loved every single stage of this project constantly learning, talking about and investigating different creatures and then their environments. Finding these different environments and materials in nature solidified their prior knowledge that then transferred in their ideas and decisions when completing the mini beast house.

So all that needs to happen now is for the mini beast's to move in and we can investigate later on, possibly in the new year.

So what do you guys think? Would you try this?