Wye: school and community groups
Wye Downs National Nature Reserve’s stunning views, beautiful butterflies and rare flowers provide a wonderful opportunity for kids to learn about and reconnect with their local environment, and to have fun outdoors!
Our education facilities
Education visits – free school sessions led by our education officer.
New education pack for KS2, with curriculum links! Downloadable from our website.
Equipment: we have equipment such as pooters (for looking at bugs) available.
Links to farms – We can organise a whole day visit where you can go to a nearby farm in the morning and the Nature Reserve in the afternoon – ask us for more details!
Activity sessions for schools
We can tailor sessions to your classes’ learning needs. Have a look in the education pack for some ideas of cross-curricular sessions for Key Stage 2. Below are some examples for KS1 and KS2 (they are all adapted for different age groups).
Wye Explorers (Yr 1 – 6, all seasons): With the help of journey sticks, children make creative stories of their Wye adventure and learn about how to map the landscape and track down the animals that live there.
Wye Time Travellers (Yr 3-6, all seasons): Travel through history at Wye, finding the marks left on Wye’s landscape from the melting of Ice Age snow, Stone Age burial mounds, up to second World War training ground.
Wye Web of Life (Yr 1 – 6, all seasons): Learn about Wye’s interlinked food webs and explore Wye’s woodland and grassland habitats, learn about woodland coppicing and grassland management through fun games and activities.
Flower Fantasia (Yrs R-6, spring + summer): Discover Wye’s famous flowers, play a pollination game, and create some fabulous flowers to take back to school. Older children can also use quadrats to compare different grassland habitats.
Butterfly Bombastic (Yr R – 6, summer): In summer Wye is full of fluttering butterflies. Find out about their lifecycle (including the caterpillars that are ‘milked’ by ants!) Make your own caterpillar and butterfly.
Mini-Beastastic (Yr R – 6, spring + summer): Mini-beasts are insects, spiders, snails and bugs. Children capture mini-beasts and make some mini-beast jewellery – bug bling! Older children also learn about adaptation through making mini-beast passports.
Spring sensations (Yr R-3, spring to summer): Go on a spring sensation hunt – listening, looking and feeling around to find the signs of spring. Try your hand at building a bird nest! Look for the springtime flowers and learn about woodland seasonal cycles.
Wye Rocks! (Yr 3 -6, all seasons): Bring geology to life up at Wye on a rock treasure hunt. Find clay, chalk and flint, learn how they were made and experiment with their properties. Hunt for the mini-beasts that help make the soil, and find the woodland animals living in the earth!
Practical information
Shelter: We have marquees.
Toilet facilities: We use the toilets in the Devil’s Kneading Trough Restaurant, and can hire portaloos if needed.
Access: Wye Downs NNR is on a hill; please contact us if any of your children have mobility problems and we will see how we can accomodate them.
Health and safety: Although we bring basic first aid kits and do our risk assessments we recommend that teachers visit beforehand to do their own risk assessments as well.
Where we are : Hastingleigh Road, TN25 5HE. 2 km from village of Wye, 6km from Ashford.
This information can be downloaded as a PDF: (582kb)
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