Hey Blog! As today is the first day of the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch weekend, I thought I’d take part, and share the results from this with you.

The Big Garden Birdwatch is the biggest citizen science survey about nature, with one million participants last year, and is quick, fun, and easy to do. You don’t even need to have a garden, just an hour to do it in, a green space to go to, some paper, an ID sheet (or know the birds already) and your eyes. Upload the results to the RSPB at https://rspb.org.uk/get-involved/activities/birdwatch/, and also find games, a quiz, bird lists, and many more bird-related activities. Started in 1979 by the RSPB, my Mum has taken part in many Big Garden Birdwatches, including the first one. Oops, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that!

These are the birds I saw while doing the hour of watching, and the totals of their numbers:

Blackbird	X 2
Blue tit	X 1
Coal tit	X 2
Dunnock	X 1
Robin	X 2
Long-tailed tit	X 9
Wren	X 1

Long tailed tits were more in number than all the other birds put together, as they often come in small flocks to our feeder. We watched out of the dining room window, with a pot of tea, and binoculars. We didn’t actually need the binoculars to see the birds, as we have a feeder only a couple of meters away from the window, but it was good to have them, just in case.

Birds are not the only animals we have seen in the garden. The low wall just outside the window, full of holes, is now known as the “mammal wall”, due to the three mice, a bank vole (nicknamed Banksy) and a shrew, (Britain’s smallest carnivore, protected by law) which we think is a Common Shrew, all coming out of the same hole. A grey squirrel comes occasionally, and ate some of the seeds off the head of the old sunflower from the summer. We get toads in summer, and frogs like to hide in the long grass. Our hope is for something really exiting, like a slow worm, or a woodpecker, to come and make our garden its home. This summer we might build a proper pond, which will encourage more wildlife to come to the garden.

Hey Blog! Today I’m writing about tracks, signs, and my favourite animals. Yes, Badgers!

On Sunday, I took part in the Whistlestop Wildlife Watch group. We meet every month, and this month’s session was about tracks and signs. We looked for footprints, nibbled nuts, animal poo, holes, and any other evidence of wildlife. We found all of these, and more, but the star find was a very clear badger path, which is why I am talking about these creatures today.

I have looked for tracks and signs many times, and one species I have been particularly interested in is the badger (meles meles). This characteristic black & white animal is familiar in the countryside, as well as being the Wildlife Trust logo, and a mark for many other organisations. My favourite sign is their foot print, which is distinguishable from a dog in the fact that it has five toes, as a dog has four. (See pic 1.) The other sign that is very clear is a latrine, or badger toilet, which is a small scraping in the ground with some poo in it (Pic 2.). Many of these are territory markers, but some are around setts so they can go to the toilet whenever. The other signs are paths, and their setts, or homes (Pic 3.). All setts are identifiable by their sideways ‘D’ shape, and have a large earth heap at the front. Only badgers have the ‘D’ shape, so it’s a pretty good clue. For a long time, I had never seen a live badger, only signs, and very sadly, dead ones. Then, in the middle of a picnic one day, I we heard a strange noise, and thought it was a squirrel, but then the black-and-white face appeared, and there was my first live badger! The only other time I have ever seen them is when we went out (on VE day, so there was a lot of sound, which we thought might drive them away) deliberately looking for them, and after a long wait, they appeared! Then, coming back, another one shot across the road, and scrambled down through the verge. Four badgers in one night! Wow!

There are a few reasons why I like badgers. The first is the cuteness. They are some of the cutest critters in the UK, and how they behave is just lovely! They have families just like us, but unlike us, they bond their family with “anal rubbing” which is basically doing “Eskimo kisses” with their bottom. There is also their heritage. Recently a hungry badger led archaeologists to a hoard of Roman coins; there is a sett near us where the animals are turning up pottery; and there is evidence a Celtic prince was buried on a bed of badger skins. These animals have a long past, and they show it. The final reason is their uniqueness, and similarities. They have five toes, patterns in their behaviour, social bonds, and many other things that we share.

The sad thing is these beautiful animals are in danger, from us. Roads, culls, habitat loss… many things are contributing to their decline. I hope people will recognise this, help the badgers by making space for them, and look after the countryside so many more people may observe these wonders of nature.

Hey Blog! Welcome to the second post in 2022. This one is my first book review of the year as I plan to do one every quarter.

This morning I received a mystery parcel in the post. It appeared to be a late Christmas present, but in fact it was a new book from an author I know. I had proofread it for her a couple of years ago. The book is called “Izzy’s Incredible Trampoline”, and is by an author known as Grace E. Bantick. It contains magic, hope, and a strange, backwards world. My topic today is reading.

However, the book I am writing about today is one I received at Christmas. It is called “The Always King”. The book is a collection of Arthurian legends, from Arthur’s birth to the end of the stories, by Chris Riddle and Kevin Crossley-Holland, illustrator and author respectively. The beauty of the book is that the stories feel as if they are told, not written. The word-crafting is wonderful, and speaks in a way not common in many books.

The real Arthur, King of the Britons, was probably a Romano-British lord whose deeds became entwined with folklore, and the mediaeval version is even more confused, based around the newly invented “Moral code of Chivalry” which didn’t exist in the times of the real king, leaving a largely fictional character who we know today. It was supposed, when two skeletons were dug up at Glastonbury abbey, along with a name plate saying Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arturius in insula Avalonia (“Here lies interred the famous King Arthur on the Isle of Avalon”), that this was the grave of Arthur and his queen, Guinevere. However, to the best of our knowledge, it’s not these two legendary figures, but a con by the monks to get more pilgrims to come to the abbey.

I really enjoyed reading this book because it contains all the legends of Arthur, the whole story. The book is mystical and historical. The legends come from the mediaeval period and we can learn so much about this time from the stories. Also, the illustrations are beautiful and perfectly complement the writing. It has all the makings of a classic.

The greatest thing about the Arthurian tales is they still go on. According to the legends, he still sleeps, waiting for the day to return…

Watch this space!

Hey Blog! I hope you had a happy 2021 and are looking forward to this new year. I wanted to be woken up at midnight going into 2022, but when my parents came to wake me, I was in so deep a sleep that even turning my light on didn’t wake me up!

As it is the new year, I also have new learning. We have started a new maths programme with White Rose Maths, I have started a “Cities” geography class, and also an “Into the Orchestra” course with Harriet Rose the Cardiff violin teacher.

In addition to these educational tasks I have been doing some archaeology top trumps from the Derbyshire Scout Archaeology badge. My Mum is the badge team’s Resource Co-ordinator, one of the top five roles, so I’m quite proud. (It also means I can listen to what is going on with the badge…) I’m really into archaeology and have been ever since I liked history and digging holes, which is a looooong time. The top trumps are all about famous archaeologists, like Mick Aston from Time Team (one of my favourite TV programmes) and Thomas Bateman, who was born in Derbyshire. In the evenings we are currently watching “Digging for Britain” which is my second favourite archaeological TV show.  

Once a month, I meet with my local YAC (Young Archaeologists’ Club) group – the Peak District group. We are about 20 in number, and our base is supposed to be Ilam, but we do travel around quite a bit. If you are interested in joining a YAC group, go to https://www.yac-uk.org/  and you can find your local club there. A few years ago I sent in an article to the local archaeology magazine and they put my picture on the front cover. The following year, the front cover photo showed visitors at an archaeological dig site which I had been to, and although blurred, I made it on to the front cover for a second time! I’m trying to go for a hat trick with the front cover, but I very much doubt that that will happen.

My favourite thing about archaeology is the real hands-on thing: the digs. With YAC, we only do them once a year, but in the summer I quite often do a test pit in the garden. I have not found anything much yet, and the things everyone wants to find are usually once-in-a-lifetime experiences, but they do happen and I keep my trowel in my desk at the ready.

Hey Blog! I hope you all had a merry Christmas. I received several books and book tokens, and spent quite a bit of the week reading.

Welcome to the end-of-year highlights review!

In this special post on Home Ed In A Shed, I will sum up my highlights of the year.

1. Sailing: I learned to sail on a two-day course in summer this year, so I am now at stage one sailing. It is an exhilarating sport, and one that I will be trying to do stage two of next year.
2. Drama performance: I took part in a production of “The Marvellous Mellow Melodrama of the Marriage of the Mislaid Minor”. It was the biggest production I have ever been in, with about 50 people as an audience, and was the best in terms of both craziness and fun!
3. Hitting a Six: In the spring, I hit a six, the highest score you can get by a single hit in cricket (to “Hit a Six”, the ball needs to land outside the boundary) in a juniors match. I was the only one of my team in the season to hit a six, which I’m really quite pleased about.
4. Caving: A few weeks before Christmas I went caving with my Scout troop. We explored Devonshire Cavern, above Matlock Bath in the Peak District. The cave was previously a lead mine, and you can still see evidence of the workings and relics of mining times.
5. The SEM session:  Written about in “Eco Week”, in late October.

So these are the five top “Highlights of my year”, and I hope 2022 will have even more to offer!

Happy New Year!

Hey Blog! Welcome to the Christmas Special issue of Home Ed In A Shed!

Wow, it’s the Christmas Eve blog post! I can’t believe it, Advent has gone so fast! It seems like no time ago that it was November. So, to celebrate the festive season and my first “Blogging Christmas” I have loads of things set up for this week’s post. 

This week I have been making a felt wreath for the decorations, made by pushing wire through scraps of felt to create a beautiful piece of artwork (and get the tiny scraps of felt out of the bag!). We have hung this up on the front door, so that callers can see my wreath.

In one of the days in my Advent calendar I got a knitted Santa Hat. It’s the one I’m wearing in the picture. I have worn it quite a lot already, including for the annual Bailey Family Christmas Quiz, which is in its second year. The Christmas Quiz is an event where me, Mum, Dad, my older brother and his wife, and my older sister all write a set of questions on a theme and we take it in turns to ask them. Everybody answers as best they can, and when all the questions have been asked the answers are revealed. This year I had “Things we do at Christmas” as my theme, and two of the five other contestants only got one answer right in my set of questions, so I guess mine were hard…

Instead of having a Christmas tree, this year we have chosen to hang holly branches around the house, a tradition that used to be done in the Mediaeval period. Did you know that Christmas trees came to Britain with Prince Albert (Queen Victoria’s husband) who brought the idea over from Germany? They are actually quite a modern tradition in Britain. You may think not having a tree means we cannot hang decorations up, but we have a cupboard that has holes in the doors which we can hang decorations on.

In “I’ve gone Nutcrackers!” two weeks ago I said that I had another piece of work to do, and last week I said I hadn’t finished it. This week I have! Here it is:

Join me next week on New Year’s Eve to find out what presents I got, and what I get up to next week!

Merry Christmas!

Hey Blog! I’ve been doing baking this week, and I thought I’d share it with you.

It’s CHRISTMAS! One week to Christmas Eve, so this is my second last post before Christmas, and I’ve been doing some baking to celebrate the festive season. Biscuits were first on my agenda.

For the biscuits, I used a recipe from an old book that used to be my Mum’s. The main recipe is: breadcrumb the butter, flour and baking powder, then add ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon and golden syrup. Next, knead into a ball, roll and cut. The picture of the finished product is below.

The other bit of baking is the one mentioned in the title – a chocolate Yule Log, its wooden counterpart is mentioned in the carol “Deck the Halls”. This one differed from that by being very tasty, and having gold stars sprinkled on it! Yule was the pagan celebration of midwinter, and is still remembered in Scandinavia as “God Jul” – Merry Christmas! The picture is also below.

Last week I said that I still had another Nutcracker project to do and I would include it next week. Well, I haven’t finished it, as the clay it’s made from took a long time to dry, but it’s a water-lily flower-inspired clay candle-holder, yet to be painted…

Hey Blog! Art-y week this week.

I really like art. It’s inspiring, beautiful, and sometimes a little bit crazy. At the moment I am doing an online art course called the Nutcracker Art Experience, making art inspired by Tchaikovsky’s music for The Nutcracker. There are five days to the project, and so far I have done four of them: A Picasso-inspired Nutcracker collage, a Dali-inspired clock, a Beatrix Potter-inspired Mouse King, and a Degas-inspired Snowflake ballerina. My favourite is the clock, which is the big picture. The others are below. We also listened to some of the Nutcracker suite that Tchaikovsky wrote, and my favourite of the extracts I’ve listened to so far is the overture.

The pictures are all done in different media: the clock, pencil; the Mouse King, watercolour pencil; the Nutcracker collage, paper cut out; the ballerina, oil pastels and cut paper. There is one more work that is a pre-party project – a Van Gogh-inspired tree, done in paint, which is the other picture at the bottom.

As I have not finished the project, I will conclude it next week, with my final piece. Keep looking out for the next post on Home Ed In A Shed!

Hey Blog! The 29^th November was Advent Sunday, and it seems that Advent has got off to a great start (Can you guess what I’m talking about? Snow!).

It was pure coincidence, but I have been extremely lucky. Last week I said that I would need a sledge before it snowed, so Mum and Dad looked on eBay and found one in Allestree ending on Friday evening and we got it! So now I have a sledge-for-life, a proper wooden one with metal runners. The day after we picked it up, it SNOWED, a lot! But it was so wet that we decided to wait until it froze…

That night, it did! And we went sledging on my new sledge, proper sledging, instead of the plastic bag sledging that we used to do. I managed to learn quite good control over the sledge, consisting of putting the right foot down if you wanted to turn right, and left foot if you want to turn left. To stop, put both feet down. The science of this is that putting a foot down creates friction, and friction saps energy from the movement of the sledge, and that means the sledge slows. If a foot is put down on one side only, then the other side is going faster, which makes the sledge turn.

Afterwards, we did some Après-sledge (taken humorously from Après-ski!) which was reading books, crème brûlée flavour hot chocolate and a mince pie.

Hey Blog! One thing I haven’t really talked about is where I live, so today I’m going to tell you.

Those readers who live in Derbyshire (where I live, and have for nearly five years – wow, five years!) may have guessed that I live somewhere near them. I live just to the north of Belper, which is great for home-edders as Belper has one of the best home ed communities in the area! Covid kind of scuppered a few of our groups, and has caused others to stop running temporarily, and not start up again yet. There’s a Games club, and Craft group, Eco Group (mentioned in a previous post), regular “Woods meet-ups”, Home-ed Drama, and then more which are not exclusively for home-eddders, such as Scouting, Drama and Cricket.

Derbyshire also has places for nature, something really important to me. I have seen many animals and birds I did not even know existed before we moved here.  I used to be interested in hawksbill sea turtles when I lived in Barbados, then it was glossy starlings in Ghana, here it’s badgers! Plus, there are awesome history sites around here, such as Peveril Castle, Cresswell Crags and Arbor Low.