"Then toads and beetles, bees and bugs, Brother snails and sister slugs, Uncle ant and earwig aunt Clap and cheer and chant this chant."

If your children have a keen sense of adventure and curiosity and you are creative in your parenting then you can find all the fun you need on your doorstep or rather in your garden. It was another glorious day in sunny Shropshire and a chance discovery of a magnifying glass we thought we had lost a while back kick started an afternoon of discovery and learning.

I asked Opeie what he wanted to go searching for and he said 'bugs', so with magnifying glass in hand we began our investigation into the greener areas of our lovely garden. It really is amazing what you can find when you are really looking and with every different species found there was more excitement from our little adventurer.

When it comes to creepy crawlies Seth is pretty much frightened of everything but Opeie is so different, he thinks everything is 'cute' and if I catch spiders in glasses in the house he has to kiss the glass before saying his goodbyes and setting them free, so as you can imagine our bug hunt this afternoon was lots of fun.

We searched the ground, found webs high up, a colony of worker ants in one of the compost bins and some big fat slugs in the other compost bin that Opeie calls the 'smelly bin'. And with most of the things we found Opeie either picked them up or was happy to have them running over his hands. I don't want Opeie to be frightened of anything so i try and treat all bugs and spiders as friends.

Opeie was fascinated by the snails and we lay on our tummies and watched them for ages before Opeie picked them up to have a closer look. Our garden seems to be some sort of meeting ground for all of Shropshires snail community I've never seen so many hiding under all our bushes and plants.

We even spotted a very rare breed of snail too later in the day...

I try and get Opeie to do some sort of writing during each day and i try to keep the theme of the words relevant to keep him motivated, so in keeping with our mornings fun I wrote down some of the things we had found for Opeie to write also while I hung out the washing to dry. He was so proud of himself when he had finished and called me over to show off his work. His handwriting is coming along great and we 're so proud of the way he is progressing.

When mommy got home from work we continued our day of Entomology (thanks Google, hahaha) with some relevant literature. Superworm and The Hungry Caterpillar were part of today's reading, read beautifully by mommy. A fitting end to a creepy crawly yet creatively cute day of fun learning.