Sing a song of reflection
I’m slowly getting through the backlog of jobs to do brought on by having a wonderfully wildly busy six weeks. I just worked out that I’ve had six weeks where I was in the woods or working outdoors with children or training adults every weekday except one, some…
Mad as a March Hare!
March has been an exciting month. So exciting in fact I have barely had time to write it all up! I have been keeping notes and I have started to wade through all my photos, so the next week or so will hopefully get me up to date on current projects which involve a bit…
Saturday afternoon on the Ridge
I was doing some research on a new site I will be using for a Forest School project when I came across a reference to a poet who had written about the wood. I wrote to her and she has sent me a copy of the poem. I think it may even inspire the children in the older…
Recapitulative play, (we get our fire ready for cooking)
In a recent post a new provocation came from the children. My job when I am in this particular school is to follow the children’s lead and extend their ideas. This can be really exciting, especially as it is a large Foundation Stage with 100+ three to five year-olds….
Forest School reflective diary as a word cloud
I have a love of words and have been using word clouds to sum up evaluations of training courses. The bigger the word is the more often it appeared. I shared one of these recently and Alex from Schola Foris suggested a collective Forest School wordle of all wordles….
Child initiated learning – making sparks!
Last night a group of newly qualified reception teachers came to the Foundation Stage Unit where I am doing some work with three to five year-olds. The lead teacher was talking about the ethos of the setting where I work and how the planning is built around the…
A woodland poem: Reviewing and reflecting
Reviewing and reflecting is a really important part of what I do as a practitioner. It is also what I encourage children and other practitioners to do so they can see their own learning and acknowledge each others achievements. Sometimes really wonderful things come…
Reflections on Forest Schools
In the last few weeks I have been working with people who are really trying to hone down their personal Forest School ethos statements. This has been an ongoing journey for me too and I thought I would share with you a little bit of that journey and extracts from my…
The language of leaping
Even in that frantic run up to Christmas the Foundation stage children (aged three to five) who had been working on the treehouse were reflective of their experiences. The tree house building which has been recorded here and here ground to a halt when we found we had…
Who goes there? Who went there?
Snow that is covering lots of the UK at the moment and when I’ve been out and about I can’t help keeping my nose to the ground looking for tracks. Walking up on the moors on Sunday (before it got so deep) we noticed a regular little round regular mark, keeping pace…
The builders take a break
As the children had their lunch I went up to the treehouse site (if you are new to this project then catch up here and here). I wanted to check things over and see what things looked like without half a dozen small bodies on top of the walls and door frame. A group of…
We move from process to product
Last week I began a child led project with a foundation stage group of children to build a treehouse. It was a very process oriented project. The children were content to have moved from hammering, sawing and drilling around a table inside, to have moved to hammering,…
