Continuing habitats study

English Nature has a useful habitats unit, (scroll down on link page) which we have been working on.
We actually began with an article from a gardening magazine which told us about hedgehogs, blue tits and bumble bees, and how to build nesting boxes for them. It would be nice to build something, but it looks far too complicated.
Then we moved onto the English Nature unit, "Habitats- Are Our School Grounds Hedgehog Friendly?". Well, first we have to change that to garden, but its easy to adapt. I have not used all the lessons, things like sketching parts of the garden would be met with groans, and as I imagine the main purpose of that activity is to get children observing the environment I think that it is less necessary in such a familiar place as the garden, which we have already examined in the course of this study. The boys probably know its less accessible areas much better than me anyway, as they are the ones who go crawling under bushes to retrieve balls they've hit there.
The lesson on food chains was good though. We made the cards for different living things, but as we didn't have 30 children to hold one each, we just laid them out on the floor, and removed the ones which got eaten/killed. We found out any information we didn't already know about what each creature eats and is eaten by, using Arkive and Wikipedia.
Today it is the hedgehog fact file activity, finding out more details about the hedgehog. InshAllah I'll use the rest of the lesson suggestions over the rest of this week and next.
Considering the large number of cats which hang around this garden I don't think we should try to encourage any hedgehogs here. Its a stressful place for wildlife, we see very few small birds. Obviously hedgehogs have their defences, but still...?