The night before the first day of term, I set up my moth trap in the school’s new learning garden. The trap consists of a black box with a UV light source and vanes mounted above. Overnight, moths are attracted to the light, hit the vanes and fall down into the box below where they hide away amongst some egg boxes waiting to be discovered by eager hands the next day. Those that miss the trap may shelter under additional egg boxes placed around the box.

The next morning Year 4 helped me record what had been caught (a complete list of what we found can be found in the comments for this post).They took some great close up photographs of the moths to help us identify them. During computer class, the children chose one of the moths to identify and find out about. They cropped a photograph and uploaded it to our account on ispot (a web site aimed at identifying anything in nature). They looked up information about their chosen moth on the UKMoths web site and also in a a book about moths. You can see what they wrote about their moths here.

I was really impressed with the children’s photographs and how quickly they picked up information about the moths. With over 2500 different species of moths in the UK, I’m sure we can look forward to some exciting finds in the future.