When you arrive at Wilder Holiday Club, our friendly team will be there to greet you and sign you in. We’ll double check your contact details and information about any medication and dietary requirements and once that’s all done, the fun can really begin!

Your child will join our lovely team of tutors as part of a group of up to 24 children and we’ll begin the day by designing your own name badge while everyone arrives. Once we’re all here we’ll play some nature games and start making some new friends before heading to our first activity.

Pond dipping is always great fun, and the children love learning about species that are well adapted to living underwater. We work in small groups to find, catch, and identify a variety of pond creatures, sparking their fascination as they learn that water scorpions breathe through their bottoms and that caddisfly larvae create their own camouflage coats of armour!

Next up - minibeast hunting! We’ll take our magnifying glasses to investigate a variety of habitats and see who might be hiding there. Developing a greater respect for nature and treating creatures with kindness is central to our holiday club, we are always very careful with these fragile minibeasts. How can we tell if what we’ve found is a cricket or a grasshopper, or a millipede or a centipede? We’ll use our ID sheets to learn the names of different minibeasts and practice how to tell them apart by playing some minibeast bingo!

Once we’ve finished exploring, we’ll re-fuel with a tasty packed lunch and then enjoy some free play in Oak Lodge Garden or Camp Wild.

In the afternoon, we’ll make our way to the forest school area for games, crafts and fire lighting. We’ll even make our own hot chocolate and toast marshmallows around the campfire! As well as this, your child will have the opportunity to learn how to use binoculars to spot wildlife on the reserve, get creative in the mud kitchen, and even try their hand at den building.

If there’s time to spare, we’ll have a great time making salt-dough sculptures of our favourite animals, play some animal charades, or maybe even dissect some owl pellets to see what treasures we can find inside.

When you collect your child at 4pm, you’ll be guaranteed to hear stories full of wildlife, adventure, and the outdoors after a day spent at Kent Wildlife Trust’s Wilder Holiday Club.

To book your space visit our Wilder Holiday Club webpage, and if you have any questions please feel free to contact the team at holidayclubs@kentwildlife.org.uk.