beachcombing

Winter Sunshine

February 3, 2014 by TheBoyAndMe 12 Comments

We love going to the beach at any time of the year, but it's incredibly difficult to find the enthusiasm when it is pouring down, and there's been a terrific amount of precipitation recently! However, last Sunday when the sun made an appearance and reminded us all of how wonderful the Winter sunshine truly is, we set off further down the coast with my brother and his family to explore Ogmore beach.

The main beach was packed but we actually headed around the coastline a few hundred yards to a beach which is a bit tricky to get down to and therefore has less visitors. The point about how tricky (in wet conditions) it is was made when I slipped on the muddy path walking down and ended up with a derriere covered in mud within three minutes of leaving the car!

Winter Sunshine

However once we were down on the beach, the sunshine was warming and the conditions idyllic. We set out our picnic blanket and sat down on the rocks chatting and munching away on pasties and grapes while The Boy and his cousin roamed amongst the rockpools, collecting pebbles and creating some beach art.

Creating Beach Art

As witnessed in many episodes of Doctor Who, this stretch of coastline has a wonderful strata in the cliffs and the beaches are crammed with rockpools galore. The perfect place to find crabs or starfish!

Exploring Rockpools

Ogmore beach is well known for the wonderful array of fossils in the rocks and cliff-face, and under the guidance of my sister-in-law who has been beach schools trained, we all set to the task of finding a variety of fossils. Finding what was once a fish, or a barnacle-like creature, is absolutely amazing and so rewarding; it reminds you of your place in the history of our planet.

Finding Fossils

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country kids

Days 209-215 of Project 365

August 3, 2013 by TheBoyAndMe 31 Comments

209-215 of 365

3rd August 2013 (Saturday) for web

209. This Is New (We went to Oxwich Bay with my brother and his family for the day. The Boy's aunty is an outdoor adventure instructor working in a variety of fields and she has been trained in 'beach school' education, so was keen to share her knowledge. We had an amazing day finding anemones, urchins, cockles, and crabs!)

210. Perspective (Off to Parc Play, one of our favourite places to go and far better than soft play! Wooden forts, zip wires, slides, sand pits, pirate ships; all outdoors or under cover. We were meeting up with a friend and her little boy who is a year older than The Boy. We haven't seen them in some time and it was interesting to see how The Boy, who was left behind physically last year, was capable of doing things that his friend couldn't. Well he could by the time we'd finished with him!)

211. Friendship (We visited Yeo Valley HQ in the Mendips today with a bunch of other bloggers to see how they are working with the Woodland Trust. It was great to meet up with Jenny and Burton again, and The Boy and he got straight up to mischief with a tempting pipe.)

212. Workspace (We've borrowed a tuff-spot and stand from the nursery at work for the Summer, definitely The Boy's new work space!)

213. David Bellamy (On Tuesday we did a leaf hunt at Yeo Valley and The Boy has been fascinated with finding different leaves ever since; he spotted the silver birch in our garden and ran to get the sheet to identify it.)

214. Focus (Today my special treat to myself arrived: a fixed focus 50mm lens for my dSLR. I have been quite sceptical about it, not really understanding what the difference would be between my 18-55mm and this. Now I get it! The depth of field is far more pronounced with this lens, as you can see from the photo above which was taken in our local nature reserve. We nipped down there to feed the swans and have lunch with my mum. I actually love this lens, and I adore this photo; it's going up on the wall.)

215. Heaven (And we're finally here! I wanted to leave home at 9am to travel down to Coombe Mill but a late night and sleepy heads this morning meant we left late. It took 3.5hrs to do the 2hrs down to Trago Mills, where we had good fun on the rides, steam train and shopping, and then a further 1.5 hours to get here. It then took thirty minutes to wait for our fish and chips before we could actually arrive at Coombe Mill. But oh my, it's all worth it!)

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Beachcombing Treasure Tile (100 Days Of Play)

May 21, 2013 by TheBoyAndMe 36 Comments

One of activities on the old '50 Things To Do Before You're 11&¾' list was 'hunt for treasure on a beach'. That may no longer be valid for the 2013 list, but it is still an excellent activity to do with children and even more so for us as we live in a coastal town. It also seemed the ideal play activity to do with The Boy for the exciting blog hop I'm taking part in (organised by Sun Scholars & Life at the Zoo) called '100 Days of Play'. The idea of the blog hop is to feature 100 different play based activities from bloggers all over the world; one a day, every day, for a 100 days.

Beachcombing Treasure Tile

We like popping down to the beach, and go every Thursday once I get home from school. On our predominantly pebble beach there is always a plethora of treasure to be scavenged; eagle eyes are definitely needed to 'comb' the grey pebbles for the different and occasional glints of seaglass or shells. This time I decided to make a relief tile of the treasure that we found, by using airdry clay and pushing the discoveries into the tile to hold them firmly in place.

I used a takeaway (tupperware) container to hold the airdry clay, this was also useful to clip the lid into place to prevent damage while transporting it home. I also made two holes near the top to tie the string through once it had dried.

We spent a good amount of time looking for fossils in the stones (not many in our area), interesting rocks with patterns in the composition, shells (both barnacle and snail type shells), and seaglass. There's a fair amount of seaglass around our way from the times when Britain was not so caring of the environment. Eroded by time, waves and rocks; the seaglass has an opaque appearance with all rough edges worn away. Occasionally you can find a piece with lettering or numbers on it, as The Boy did, and we came up with a great story of it belonging to a pirate.

Beach Treasure Tile

This is the type of activity that doesn't have to be limited to a beach, it would be just as good in a woodland for example. The only issue there is that over time the items found in a woodland will rot, but for the short term it would work just as well. It could even work for a box of magic buttons or trinkets collected over time and from different generations.

It's also an excellent resource for storytelling, as mentioned above; the reasons and back-stories to the different treasures could be fascinating and an excellent form of oracy development.