As part of our fabulous curriculum several children take part in weekly Forest School Sessions at Everton Nature Garden. Forest School allows us to continue our holistic approach to learning in the great outdoors!
Well basically it is a lot of fun for our children but also an excellent opportunity to learn new skills such as; fire lighting, den building, environmental art and tool use. It's also an excellent opportunity for children to develop their communication and interaction skills through play!
The ethos of Forest Schools is:
For children to engage in positive outdoor experiences, whatever the season, whatever the weather!
For children to learn through play and their own experiences.
For children to learn to manage risks, problem solve and of course explore!
This term we've had some new children join us at Forest School so the first part of the term was all about learning what we do at Forest School! The children have become familiar with a new and completely different learning environment to what they are used to and they've all had so much fun learning new skills and developing these skills. For the first few weeks we concentrated on learning our Forest School rules and discovering the environment. We then moved onto using tools starting with the bow saw to make tree cookies. We then learnt to use the hand drill to drill holes in our tree cookies to make necklaces for ourselves and our friends! We worked on our fine and gross motor skills and followed visual and verbal instructions to complete this task and were very proud when showing off our work when it was completed! We have also learnt how to use a sheath knife to cut bits of wood to use on our fires! In the second half of the term we began learning how to light fires and we are all very careful and make sure we follow the rules and wear our fire gloves when putting wood into the fire to keep it lit. We've made lots of tasty treats including hot dogs, s'mores and melted chocolate! As well as all of this we have made flower crowns, stick men, leaf hedgehogs and wands. We've been on wilderness walks to collect different items for our creations, we've got very messy in the mud kitchen and we've had a lot of fun on the tarpaulin slide and like to let our staff know to go fast when they pull the slide down the hill!
Forest School is back up and running this year! We are lucky enough to be able to use Everton Nature Garden a couple of times a week so that even more children are able to access sessions and benefit from the fabulous opportunities we have at Forest School. Elm and Cedar classes are currently going to Forest School on Tuesday's and Birch and Rowan classes are going on Wednesday's. We can't wait to see what the children get up to and gain from the sessions.
Take a look through some of our photos and see what we have been up to!
There was an error processing this link (the page was not found).
There was an error processing this link (the page was not found).