Conkers, conkers obly obly onkers!

Obly, obly onker, my best conker,

Obly, obly O, my best go.

This autumn is proving to be a rather special one with trees heavy with fruits and adorned with a stunning rainbow of leaves. This year's conker crop has been particularly impressive so at Forest School today we decided to revive an old playground favourite. We began be researching the rules for playing conkers. The children found lots of different versions of the game in books and on the internet. Between them, they settled on the following rules:

Incoming!

1.The owner of the smallest conker gets to go first.

2.Each player gets three attempts at hitting their opponents conker.

3.The person holding the target conker cannot move their conker when it is being aimed at.

4.A successful hit earns an extra turn.

5.If the strings tangle whoever shouts 'strings' gets the next turn.

6. If a struck conker completes a full circle, whoever shouts 'round the world' gets the next turn.

7.If a strung conker is dropped on the floor, the opponent can shout 'stamps' and stamp on the conker. However, if the conker owner shouts 'no stamps' first, the conker cannot be stamped on.

8. The winning conker inherits the win score of the defeated conker. So if a one-er beats a ten-er it becomes an eleven-er.

It's a while since I've played conkers, but I had forgotten just how tricky it is to get a successful strike. Much more practice will be required over the next few weeks!

Our Nursery teacher kindly brought in some long lengths of willow for us to plant. Some of children however had other ideas for some of the poles. Sophie and Ella were keen to use the knot tying skills they had been practicing to make some bow and arrows. They experimented with different thickness of willow to see which would give the right amount of flex. After a spot of trial and error, they discovered that the string had to be tensioned in order to fire the arrow and that long thin arrows worked better that short thick arrows. They were keen to carry on with this activity next week and have been thinking about what materials they could use to make flights for the arrows.

Alisha decided to use some of the cut rods to create some natural art and Abdullah chose to make a javelin from his stick.

Some of the group began to make a wigwam from the rods but time had caught up with us so we plan to revisit this activity next time. 

Petra chose to take some conkers home to make some woodland jewellery with which she is planning to show off at Forest School next week. Looks like we have oodles of creativity to look forward to.