Author: jennyf74

🌳🌲🌳LOVING all the greens! Using shapes (from a previous session) to have some mindful moments to see what catches our eye. We also used an iPad to focus in and look at colour, shape and texture. 💚

🌧️ LOOK how much rainwater collected over the weekend! Fortunately the top end of the site which has seen the most erosion still looks ok and is recovering nicely so I didn’t mind this and saw it instead as offering another opportunity for play.

🌳SOO we splashed and made puddles, threw in sticks and leaves and then used ropes and buckets to sort of ‘pulley’ the water out 💦

🌳🌲🌳 I believe it’s good to keep growing, moving and learning as a practitioner, I love learning from other outdoor educators and recently I’ve been influenced, and encouraged by, some amazing storytellers. I’ve always been interested but have made more of a conscious move towards tales connecting to nature, folklore – our ancestry.

🌳🌲🌳I am by no means “off script” yet (I don’t write the stories but seek them out) but have found moving around and “owning” the story really enjoyable. Today my stories were from the book “Foraging” (in photo). Wouldn’t it be great to run a storytelling workshop?? 💚💚

🌳🌲🌳Telling the tale of the Rose Queen and Daisy today before some fun playing bat and moth and then going off to explore 🔍 our Spring growth Spinney and making a few Rose Queen peg dolls of our own 🌹 🌼💚

🌳🌲🌳MY days are pretty full on at school (as are everyones!) which I love, BUT I also love those mindful moments that occur, even more so if they are unexpected. I had Nordic braiding left out from a year 4 group earlier in the week which were spotted and provided some lovely 1-1 time with a child from a younger year group. With awesome hand to eye coordination and concentration they produced a beautiful bracelet and, I think, quite rightly felt rather proud of it too. 😊🌳💚

🌳photo taken out of school hours, example bracelet 🌳

🌳🌲🌳THE morning after the [den building challenge] session before … love seeing the dens after. THESE dens show a completely different side to ‘learning’. Having just read an amazing journal about Forest school and how this sits alongside the formal mainstream education system this is a great example of informal learning that paradoxically supports formal learning 🤨🤨🌳🌲💚

🌳🌲HAPPY Earth Day 🌎, filling our day as I said we would, using Elder to make spud guns and use Sonic the Hedgehog pictures as targets, as I said we could. 💚

🌳direct contact, appreciation of trees, conversation about pilth, tool use, trying something new, 😊

🌳🌲SUCH joy to see the sunshine 🌞 and to have dry sessions (so far!), this week. Deeply appreciative of the school site and it’s Spring growth. Sooo pleased to see grass growing back where it had been worn down to mud through footfall exacerbated by the rain. 🌳🌲

🌳🌲THIS week groups have been making elder puppets, den building, cafe making, trying our hand at dandelion pancakes (not a BIG success!), whittling, some cleaver hapa zome and sun light paper printing … 🌲🌳

🌲🌳photos taken out of school hours 😊

🌳🌲NETTLE hummus …. 😋

🌳I feel like I added too much water and maybe too much garlic (!!) but it’s very yummy. Didn’t follow any particular recipe but there’s lots out there:

Handful of nettles rinsed then popped into hot water
Tin of chickpeas
Garlic clove
Splash of olive oil
Some water
Some lemon juice – I squeezed a whole lemon 🍋

Used the hand blender 💫 💫

Might pop in some jack in the hedge next time instead of the garlic clove to see what that tastes like.

🌳🌲I feel like we should all have a wild dinner date or picnic 🧺?

🐸🐸EXPLORING frog spawn and using clay to make some of our own … 🐸🐸

🐸🐸LOVED going through my ‘planning’ box and finding these fab resources … not sure where I got the yoga sheet from but the frog one was by Muddy Faces 🐸🐸🌳

🌼 Ummm lovely daisy balm making. Definitely feeling the signs of Spring this week.

🌼 There’s lots of variations on this, some add lavender oil, some leave the daisies to stew in the olive oil for a couple of weeks but as I have the attention span of a knat and sometimes just want a ‘quick result’, I did this instead (I appreciate not as potent) 😊

Fill half a small jar with daisies (the sort of jars you get in hotels with jam in)
Pour in olive oil and leave (we left ours for about 45 mins)
Melt bees wax or coconut wax in pan then mix in olive oil and daisies
Drain off the daisies as you pour into the glass jars. 🌼🌼💚

🌼IF I had more time I would do it differently but amongst all of this was fire lighting, pizza making, working together, having ideas about how long the wax might take to set, understanding the medicinal uses of plants and viewing our landscape through the lens of our ancestors.

(The closest I think I’ve found to how I do it is in the book Knowledge to Forage – Home is Where our Heart is❤️)