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Join the Hoppy Families Nature Trail Campaign!

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We’re delighted to have launched our ‘Hoppy Families Nature Trail’ crowd funding campaign on 1st February.  The first week has been a great success with £720 pledge by our crowd starters!

We have recently taken over the management of the Boardwalks and Thorpe Meadows nature reserve in Peterborough and want to get more families and local people out enjoying it!

Boardwalks Hoppy Families Nature Trail campaign

The exciting new crowdfunding campaign aims to raise £3500 to create a ‘Hoppy Families’ Nature Trail at the reserve. It is hoped that the campaign will encourage more people to visit the Boardwalks as although it is free and easily accessible, being close to the City Centre, few people seem to know about this beautiful greenspace.

Froglife’s Learning Coordinator Jenny Leon says that “fewer than a quarter of children regularly use their local ‘patch of nature’ and fewer than one in ten children regularly play in wild places.  This is a massive difference from their parents’ generation and we want to help change this in Peterborough by helping families to get out and explore this hidden gem right on their doorstep”.

Hoppy Families Nature Trail at Boardwalks

For those who are unfamiliar with it, crowdfunding is when many individuals are asked to contribute money towards a cause or project to help them reach a specific target amount.  Any amount can be pledged, and rewards are often offered by the campaigners as extra incentives. It is relatively new to the environmental sector and this campaign is one of several in the East of England region whose experiences will be compiled into case studies for other environmental organisations to learn from, to help build more successful campaigns in the future.

For more information (including a great video) about the project and to find out how you can get involved please visit www.crowdfunder.co.uk/hoppy-families.

Inspired by Nature: Limericks

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Inspired by Nature is a new themed Croak to entertain you with some of my own and my favourite famous poems written about nature and the outdoors. I hope it will stimulate you to get creative with words and write something yourself. If you do and would like to share them with us, please post them on our facebook page. 
Becca (Conservation Youth Worker: Green Pathways Project).

Everyone loves a limerick, but have you ever tried to write one yourself?

I attend a weekly creative writing class. One week, I had not done any homework and knocked these out after work to ensure I had something to hand in! I love being outdoors, so everything I wrote is true (except now I have my own handsome man and so obviously, only love that one!).

A limerick is a short funny poem with 5 lines where the first, second and fifth lines rhyme and the third and forth rhyme (in literary terms, this is described as the rhyme scheme AABBA). They are often rude and nonsense. The first line usually introduces a character and a place. There are complicated ways to talk about the rhythm which uses words like feet, syllables and meter but basically it goes like this:

da DUM da da DUM da da DUM
da DUM da da DUM da da DUM
da DUM da da DUM
da DUM da da DUM
da DUM da da DUM da da DUM

Here are mine:
There once was a girl in the fens
Who took teenagers out to build dens
She wrote poetry for fun
Read short stories she’s done
As they always contain handsome men
There once was a wildlife nerd
Whose specialist subject was birds
She also liked badgers
And searching for adders
And loved handsome men, so I’ve heard

What you can do:

Why not have a go yourself, perhaps inspired by a walk on your local nature reserve or watching the birds with your kids ? Please don’t share the really rude ones, but any that you would read to your mother we would love to see on our facebook page.

croak all about it