Session 14 - Child Led Campfire Building

In the previous session the children had said that they were keen to build their own fire from scratch without any help from me. So today, this is exactly what they did.

They worked together to set out the tool/fire safety area and then talked through our safety procedures for working in the fire circle. The jobs were shared out with two children electing to take the lead on fire building and two choosing to sort the fire wood and prepare the chocolate bananas and marshmallow skewers.

The fire was ignited very quickly but began to die out. The children shared their ideas about how to keep the fire lit and after adding some more smaller twigs and blowing on the base of the fire, the flames were soon well established.

The whole group took it in turns to feed more fuel onto fire and before long they were ready to cook the chocolate bananas. These had been made by pushing chocolate buttons through the skins of the bananas and then wrapping them in foil to protect them from the flames. The foil packages were placed directly onto the burning embers. The children chatted about how the foil protected the bananas from burning.

The children have used peelers before to whittle sticks, but today they moved on to using fixed blade knives. Using a knife allowed the children to fashion a better point to their marshmallow skewer and also to work with dryer and thicker sticks. They have already got marshmallow toasting down to a fine art, so I decided to show them how to make an American campfire favourite 'smores' by sandwiching the toasted marshmallow between two chocolate digestive biscuits (a trick I had learning on my campfire training day a few weeks previously). Granted, not the most healthy snack, but we do need to keep our energy levels up on these cold winter days. Perhaps we will try barbequed fruit skewers next time.

There were some chocolate buttons left over and the children wanted to try and melt them over the fire. They tried out two different methods. The first was wrapping the buttons in some foil as we had with the chocolate bananas. The second was melting them in one of our enamel mugs. Both methods resulted in melted buttons but each with their draw backs. The buttons in the enamel cup melted very quickly and began to stick to the bottom of the cup (the Forest School label on the base of the mug melted too!). The buttons in the foil parcel melted well but it proved rather messy trying to scrape the chocolaty liquid from the foil. There is nothing wrong with a bit of experimentation though, for this is how we move our learning on to the next level.

As we extinguished the fire and packed away, we chatted about what sort of things the children would like to do at the parent's day Forest School session. The children said that their parents had been excited to about their campfire cookery, so we should definitely include some of that. One child was also keen to teach her parents the different knots she had learned so we will make sure we have some rope available to do this. More than anything, I am sure the parents will love seeing how passionate their children have become about outdoor learning and how they have grown in confidence and independence over the past few months.