A Berry Good Day

Today our Year 4 have been taking a closer look at two of Forest School's favourite trees - willow and elder.

The children correctly identified that willow is often found growing near water and although they recognised its long slender leaves and flexible branches, they were unsure of the name. One interesting suggestion was that it was a dock tree.

The children split off into groups to experiment with different ways of using the willow branches. Sahdiya created a mini willow den by pushing the branches into the ground and weaving them in to each other. Timea stripped the bark from her branch and decorated it with a poppy to create a rather fashionable walking stick.

Next we looked at the elder tree. We have a few elder trees growing as part of a mature hedgerow around the perimeter of the site. After looking at some examples of the bark, berries and leaves, the children set off to see if they could locate any of the trees growing on our site. They were quickly able to spot the trees with berries on them , but the ones without took a bit more working out.

From our guide books we discovered that the elder tree is also known as the witches tree and that it is renowned for its medicinal properties. Luke decided that he wanted to create a witches' brew from some of the berries we collected. Whilst Bailey and Connaugh discovered that the natural dying properties of the berries made it great to use as fake blood!

At snack time we sampled some delicious elderflower cordial. Unfortunately our elder trees at school flowered mainly during the school holidays, so we were unable to harvest the flowers. We did discuss though, the possibility of using some of the berries to make some elderberry syrup.