A New Forest School Year

Monday marked the beginning of a new Forest School year at Fagley Primary and that means a new group of children about to embark on their Forest School journey. The group have had a chance to look through last year's floor book, so have an idea of what they can expect from a typical Forest School session. We began the session by talking about what the children enjoy to do at home. Popular pastimes included playing video games, football and riding bikes.

When asked what Forest School entailed, the children's suggestions included survival skills, den building, studying wildlife and playing games.

After a quick briefing about wearing appropriate clothing for the conditions and introducing the concept of carrying out a risk benefit assessment, we suited up and headed outside.

Warm-up games aimed at establishing our boundaries and recall signals included the Forest School favourite, seconds away hide and seek.

After the warm-up, the next phase of a Forest School introduction session involves planting the 'seed' of an idea. As sessions progress and the children's skills develop, they will come to sessions with their own ideas about what they wish to do. At the beginning of the program the Forest School practitioner may need to initiate activities until the children develop the confidence to direct their learning.

Our seed was castles. The children have begun to plan their own castle blueprints in class, so they were encouraged to translate their ideas to the outdoor environment. Building materials included rope, tarps, canes, bungee cords, the poles from a mini greenhouse and any natural materials they could gather. There was much animated discussion about which materials to use and how big to build the castle.
They began by using mainly single poles and tarps. One of the children wanted the castle to be higher and eventually another child realised that they could use the plastic pole connectors to join two poles together. This led to a flurry of pole joining activity, before it was decided that the roof of the castle was still not high enough.

A decision was made to move their castle building efforts over to the den building posts to enable them to raise the roof on their castle. A combination of bungee cords and ropes were used to create a framework to support the tarpaulin roof. One of the children realised that they could use the log stepping stones to stand on so that they could reach the top of the den building posts.

Just then, the heavens opened and the task quickly switched to creating an emergency rain shelter. It may have not been the the best constructed shelter ever made but it kept us dry!

By the time the rain had passed the roof of the shelter was drooping considerably. As the children shook the the tarp to remove the puddles, they observed how the water splashing everywhere and the rustling sound of the tarp reminded them of the sea. This led to them diving in to their newly created 'wave' pool.

With the end of the session drawing near, we cleared away our equipment and reflected on our experiences of our first session together over a cup of juice and a cereal bar.

The children said next week they want to try and build a stronger shelter at the beginning of the session in case it rains so that we have somewhere in which to take refuge.