Forest School – Year 1

Following yet another storm earlier in the week, we were very lucky with the weather and were blessed with a wonderful afternoon; blue skies and plenty of sun.

Children had a real challenge this week, as the class were split into two groups for a game of ‘Count off’. The idea of this game is to count from one to twenty without preplanning who is going to say which number. If more than one person says a number, the count begins from the beginning again.

This week our session began with a lively game of ‘Squirrels in a tree’, where children scamper around like little squirrels but have to listen carefully for the owl swooping down! Very quickly, in pairs they make a tree to house a given number of squirrels. Cooperative learning was high on the agenda as well as problem solving, especially when four squirrels had to hide in the tree!

After an energetic game to get us warmed up, the children listened attentively as Mrs. Farrington demonstrated the safety around using a pair of secateurs. All the children got to practice this new technique and showed that they had listened with great care as they put a glove on their helper hand and trimmed off the small branches. The children then began to make a woodpile, sorting out the wood we collected last week into bigger logs, sticks and branches.

This week the grounds men came to prune some of our trees at school. As wood is very scarce in our Forest School at the moment we grabbed the chance to collect as many branches as we could. The children were brilliant at clearing the area and dragging the branches safely into place.