Friday 21st March 2025

Although it was the spring equinox, it felt more like a summer’s day in the nature area.  Whilst we were sat, a robin and blue tit arrived and I had already seen a couple of butterflies and a bee amongst the comfrey.  The session started with Felicity bringing in some of her finds from the beach and that got us talking about the variety of life- the sheer number of seaweeds and the kinds of shells you can find- mussel, clam, conch.  I then asked them about the fossil that had been brought in by Ffion earlier (still no reply from the Natural history Museum yet), but I am sure it is a trilobite.  This fitted in really well with our guided meditation that we continued today in the sunshine. Despite the children thinking that it looked like a millipede or centipede ( I agree), these creatures were around 500 million years ago and lived in the sea (they are related to horse-shoe crabs and belong to the arthropods family).  Sadly, they were wiped out in the first mass extinction about 250 million years ago, when up to 96% of marine life was made extinct.  Masses of volcanic activity all over the planet wiped out most of life.  The children loved the meditation.  As well as finding it relaxing, they marvelled afterwards at some of their discoveries about our planet.  Some of the observations they shared were: that earth was molten when it first formed; that at times there was one continent- Pangea and hardly any oceans; that once a day only lasted 10 hours; that the sky was pink and the sea green; and that snowball earth 725 million years ago, endured temperatures of -50 degrees Celsius at the equator; finally that the moon formed as a result of a collision with Earth and a Mars sized planet.  As usual, we ran out of time, just managing to fill the pond and the bird feeders.