Early Morning Visitors πŸ¦Š

🦊WE know we have a lot of visitors, usually when it’s half term, but we caught this visitor passing through on camera having a morning stroll before we all returned to spoil their peace and quiet a few hours later. Managed to capture a lot of cats too πŸ˜ŠπŸ¦ŠπŸŒ³πŸ’š

Giant Noodles!

🌳NOT sure if we made tongs OR giant chopsticks BUT it was great fun twisting the hazel – the hazel had been cut the evening before but it still took 4 of us to make it bend!

🌳ANOTHER new skill/ idea taken away from the East Midlands FEN – Forest Education Network skills day πŸ’šπŸ˜Š

Tracking Fun

🌞 ALWAYS seems appropriate to play a good old fashioned water pistol tracking game the moment we have any HINT of good weather- makes me think of Summer🌞

🌞Hunters and deers. Amazing silent moments before the game begins. Some fox 🦊 walking. Lots of laughter.🌞

Animal Hotel

🌳🌲PERFECT day for lounging around in a 4* Animal Hotel 🦑 🐰 🦊 πŸ¦‰. I feel like the animals have also been sorted into categories ….. πŸ’š

Network Meet-up

🌳🌲🌳SO lovely to have a little networking meet up at my school site πŸ’š. It was like an explosion of Forest school/ outdoor practitioner ideas and chat. LOTS of conversations surrounding meeting the NEEDS of the group, rather than your plan, resources, approaches and settings. Whether we were just starting out or had been running sessions for a while, I feel like we all learnt something. Definitely wasn’t long enough … looking forward to the next one! Thank you for coming. 😘

🌳A Sunday date will be organised shortly along with another after school slot 🌲

πŸŒ³πŸŒ²πŸ’š

Nettle Soup

🌳🌲🌳Sooo last week one of my groups enjoyed making, far more than eating!, some nettle and vegetable soup that looked a lot like this (but far less oily) …. πŸ˜‹πŸ˜‹

Pondering some questions β€¦

🌳🌲🌳I LOVE that we’re all beginning to talk about this – What is Forest School? BUT it’s beginning to blow my mind! DO you think that Forest School should be seen as a form of environmental education OR see it as a child led play based approach? DO you recognise that Forest School has become a product, become commercialised and has been adapted to suit the needs of our education system with many crossovers to outdoor learning? CAN it become a model which has a relationship to the formal learning of the classroom? WHY does it feel that it now represents something that wasn’t intended and that some of us prefer to be recognised simply as delivering a nature centric programme? AND, does it matter? πŸ€¨πŸ€¨πŸ’š

No such thing as β€˜just’ a stick

🌳Inspired by the workshop led by Woodland Survival Crafts at the East Midlands FEN – Forest Education Network and putting out a selection of branches and sticks for the groups to investigate and use.

🌳WITH the Elder we’ve made bubble pipes and jewellery. The Willow has been used to make simple shapes and crowns and the sticks were used for den building. Now collecting β€˜Y’ sticks for some more possibilities. 😊🌳🌲🌳