A Sticky Situation

Tadpole Pond

Alex's Viking Inspired Axe

Last week, some of the children suggested that they would like to make some stick people. We headed down to the the woods with string and fabric, stopping off at our frogspawn puddle on the way. The tadpoles have now hatched and were happily wriggling around. We will continue to check on them each time we  visit the wood.

Dylan's Stick Man

The children chose where to make our base for the afternoon and then set about looking for suitable sticks to create their people from. The group had a range of options for joining their limbs to the body of their sticks including rubber bands, string, tape and wire. Danish found it difficult to wrap the wire tight enough around his stick to hold the legs in place. Dylan wanted to use string to attach the legs to his stick but was struggling to work out how to do it. I demonstrated how he could use a clove hitch and lashing to join two sticks. Amna and Zara then decided to use this method to attach the arms to their sticks too. 

Zara's Stick Man 

Mrs McGrath's Stick Man 'Bryan'

Alex's Holly-headed Stick Person

The step we found the most tricky was finding a suitable head for our stick people and fixing the head to the body. Dylan chose to make his stick person's head from a stick bent into a loop. The first stick he tried was dry and brittle and snapped when he tried to bend it. I suggested he look for a tree with more supple branches such as silver birch. Dylan was able to identify a silver birch tree just down the hill from us by its tell-tale silvery white bark. He found the perfect bendy stick on the ground by the silver birch and was able to fashion it in to a loop. 

Danish chose to make his stick person's head from wire whilst Alex opted for a holly leaf. 

Next, the children used scraps of fabric from our rag bag to dress their characters.  They started thinking about what sort of character their stick people may have, the places they might live and things they may like to do.

Next week, the children would like to take their stick people back to the woods to create homes, tools and perhaps even pets for them. This prompted an interesting debate about whether stick people would have stick dogs as pets!