Creating a pond for children

how to get your kids outside
As featured on The Works blog 

When you join the RSPB, you receive activity packs the whole family can get involved in and we loved creating our bug hotel under the guidance of the RSPB's booklet.
using RSPB giving nature a home booklets

Now it was time for our next challenge - to create a mini pond.  I've been looking forward to creating this with my son ever since we bought our £2 washing-up bowl from B&Q.

using RSPB giving nature a home booklets for a mini pond

As I imagined, my son was very keen to dig a hole in the garden, he rehomed all the worms he found and placed random bugs in the hotel!

digging our mini pond

He got bored.

I was left to dig our hole, it wasn't a big hole but took long enough for my son to ask me why I hadn't finished his pond yet!  He's very much a hard taskmaster that one.

Once our bowl was straight, we added in pebbles across the bottom, stones up one side to be used as stepping stones should any little creatures fall in and stones around the top.  We added twigs as ladders and a little water plant to finish off the pond.

creating our mini pond

creating our mini pond

The fun part began - we filled our pond up with rain water which had been collected in a bucket, I knew I had that bucket left out for a reason......

As you can see from the picture below, my son also thought the pond needed some mud!  I just let it go, it's his pond after all.....

filling our mini pond

The mud soon settled down.

filling our mini pond

We love our little pond and check it daily, we clean it of leaves and check nothing has fallen in.  It's a great little conversation piece and gives my boy some responsibility of his own that he loves.

Then, whilst we were in town a couple of weeks ago The Works were selling some fabulous little beach house money boxes and it was my partner who suggested we get some to make a beach scene around the pond!

And so we did.

creating a beach scene round our mini pond

This is a great little pond, we've had such fun making it and I would highly recommend this if you have space in your garden.

Thanks to RSPB's Giving Nature a Home booklet we now have a bug hotel, a mini pond and a hedgehog house (that we bought).  Our garden is really beginning to feel homely now.


This activity features in Twinkl’s World Food Day and the Problem with Water.

4 comments:

  1. I hope your son gets some frog spawn in his pond next year. We've got a wildlife pond and my daughter, Ella, loves going pond dipping in it and looking for tadpoles. She lets us know when they start changing and growing legs. She gets very excited when we end up with a garden full of tiny froglets. She has to walk with me when I mow the lawn so she can move them safely out of the way!

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    1. Oh how lovely! I hope to get frog spawn too, it would be amazing for Max to watch them grow.

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  2. what a great idea to make a little pond like that! Miss T would love to do that as 'ponds' has been one of their topics this term at school. x

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    1. Oh perfect. It's just a little water bowl and Max investigates all the wildlife that visits it.

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