Hedgehog Lapbook Resources

I wrote last month about an Owl themed day that I hosted and, last week I followed that up with a hedgehog themed day. I thought I’d share there the things that we did, as well as links to the various bits and pieces that I used to form the lapbooks that the children made.

Welcoming the children

I think it’s always important to give the children space to share anything they might already know, so I gathered them all in the front room and asked them some questions. I had spent a little time making a quick list of things I wanted to make sure we covered. The children mostly covered this with a few prompts and anything that was missed I added in. I then talked them through the four activities that they would be doing before we split into two groups.

Creative Activities

As noted above, I had created four activities for the day. One was a cake decorating activity. The children each had two small buns, some buttercream, chocolate chips and some crushed up chocolate flake and desiccated coconut. They used these to create some hedgehog buns.

We then had a second creative activity to make the cover for the lapbook. Using a hedgehog template the children decorated these with hearts (I’d made hearts using a paper punch and some paper of different colours). These looked really nice and were a good way to decorate the lapbooks.

The final creative activity was to make a walking hedgehog. I printed the templates out onto card to make them a bit sturdier. The children coloured them, cut them out then fixed the split pin in place to create the hedgehog.

Team Activites

One of the things we talked about was how hedgehogs have a very good sense of smell. I’d created seven covered tins with a variety of different things in and the children were tasked with working out what was inside each tin. They smelt each one first and each would say what they thought it was. I then gave them eight cards that had an item written on it, and they had to match the tin to the card. They all did really well on this and got most of them right – I think it was just tea and coffee that they got mixed up on.

Lapbooks

I packed a lot into this hedgehog lapbook! They stuck the decorated hedgehog onto the front page and I’d printed some additional decorative pages for them to add if they wanted to. There were quite a few inserts, I’ve shared these below and I got these from two main sites, Kigaportal.com (I bought a one-month subscription to access the content) and Home School Share.

From Home School Share I used:

• New Words – we had talked a lot in the welcome section so this was a good opportunity for the children to note down the vocabulary we had covered
• A Home for a Hedgehog – the children wrote about their habitat
• Hoglets – some facts about baby hedgehogs
• Hedgehog Info – three questions about what a hedgehog does when feeling threatened and information about their prickles

From Kigaportal.com I used:

• Folded hedgehog – children choose the correct diet
• Mini flap book – hedgehog anatomy
• Hedgehog Hiding place – sweet card about where they nest

Finally, I also included an information sheet from twinkl about hedgehogs as well as a word search.

It wasn’t intended that the lapbooks were completed on the day – and I think there is some benefit to them being completed at home; it’s a good way to consolidate learning.