Nocturnal Animals

The Junior infants read a new story this week. It was the well known and much loved ‘Owl Babies’ by Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson.

After reading the story the children were struck by something and posed an interesting question - why were the owl babies awake at night time?

So we decided to investigate! We knew that some animals, like hedgehogs are nocturnal, because we learned about that when we were investigating autumn. So we surmised that if the owls were awake during the night time too, then that must mean they are also nocturnal. From here we went investigating, with our teachers help, to find some more nocturnal animals and we found that there are lots. From cats, to mice, badgers and deer, there are lots of nocturnal animals that share our world.

We learned a very interesting new word too - diurnal. This means animals and people who sleep during the night and wake up during the day - like us! We are diurnal, the opposite of nocturnal. To put our new knowledge into practice we completed a sorting activity.

We had some glow sticks left over from our Halloween party so we pulled down all the blinds in our classroom to make it dark, like it is for nocturnal animals. We then activated our glow sticks but we will leave understanding that chemical reaction for science week another year!