One Year Pond Study: Catching up Week 28

Our pond a couple of weeks ago:

I know, I don’t mean to confuse you all.  We did a pond study, at the same time as treating everyone to hot chocolates for A5’s birthday, just before we went away on holiday.  I had planned to write this pond study up whilst I was at my in laws, as they had kindly said I could use their computer.  Unfortunately, although I had prewritten a few posts prior to travelling once there my motivation dwindled a little.  This meant I ended up taking an unplanned lazy week away.  Oh it was wonderful!!  This is my catch up post for that week (week 28 I believe).  I had thought of leaving it, but I knew it would niggle me each time I looked at our one year pond study and saw that I had a week missing!

We went early in the morning, accompanied by Gary, who takes every family member’s birthday off work to spend the day with them.  We popped into my favourite coffee shop and treated all five children to hot chocolates:

It was a fairly unusual time for us to be going and it was quite misty, with the sun starting to rise high in the sky:

Whilst the older one’s went off exploring:

A5 snapped away at everything and everyone with her new birthday camera:

This week there was a lot of action at the pond.  First the children exclaimed that they had just seen a ‘huuuuuge’ frog leap out from the reeds and into the pond:

I wandered over and managed to get this photo.  It is not clear what it is but it certainly looks like it could be a large frog:

The heron was in it’s normal place:

Although, spotting us, he did not stay for long:

The heron flying off caused the ducks who had been swimming about quite peacefully to fly off also:

Although they settled back down fairly quickly.  Once settled we heard a huge splash and saw a large fish leap out of the water and flop back down again.  This seems to happen a lot over summer, but I am never quick enough to get a photo.  But I did manage to get the splash:

Our goals for this pond study was to do a water study, collecting some water and looking at it under the microscope.  We did some looking under the water using our periscope:

And we even collected some water.  We had of course forgotten to bring any containers, so we rinsed out the hot chocolate cups and used those.  Resourceful, no?

We took our carefully collected water in the hot chocolate cups home and popped them on the kitchen dresser out of harm’s way.  And that, unfortunately, is where they stayed until we returned from our holiday two weeks later.  I’ll not divulge the state of the water at that time, and I don’t even want to think about the smell emanating from the cups.  Suffice it to say, the cups were not cleaned quite as well as we had hoped.  Say no more.

I’ll leave you with one last photo of our pond, taken just before we left, as the mist was beginning to lift:

Beautiful!