This week our crafty blogger Toby and Roo tells us how to create a bug hotel for your back garden creepy crawlies!

The weather has finally picked up a bit here, so it has been our plan to get out into the garden and make the most of what we have.

It was rather lovely weather on Sunday, which worked perfectly as none of us were feeling up to a weekend of busy days after the first week back at school after the Easter break, so the garden was a great place to play. We decided to create a bug hotel for our insect pals, using whatever we could find in our garden.  Creating a bug hotel is one of the most simplistic crafts you can do in the garden with your kids - you just need to collect whatever you have! We used an old broken garden ball decoration (which I checked over to make sure there were no sharp edges), then collected things to go inside. This was the most fun part for Roo, he got dressed up as Iron Man, and ran about collecting twigs, dry leaves, stones, an old broken plant pot, pine cones and broken bits of pottery.  Once that was all collected it was merely a case of layering it up, putting certain pieces here and there and choosing a spot in the garden for the hotel to go. The best thing about a bug hotel for your garden is that it doesn’t have to be as professional looking as some of the ones that you see on Pinterest, or the ones that you can buy in the shop, it simply has to provided a nice place for the bugs and creepy crawlies to nest in and be discovered at a later date.  I would suggest grabbing a book about bugs, or even download a worksheet for your kids so that they can identify the bugs that make there way into their hotel!