The Chestnuts class developed their fire lighting skills this week, recalling the fire skills from their last session. They helped sort the sticks into different sizes to start the fire with. Once the fire was going, the children watched popcorn ‘pop’ by heating it on their fire with great excitement! And of course eating it!
The whole class also explored the Forest School area and chose to follow their own interests.
There was lots of rain left from the recent we days, which went into ‘cooking’ muddy dishes in the mud kitchen.
Some children found that they could sculpt the mud into snowmen, or mudmen! The children carefully created different sized spheres and connected them together with their fingers, sculpting the mud. They put them carefully in the shelter of the bug hotel to dry out and look at next session.
The class took digging tools to the large hole and explored digging out the rain soaked mud, watched the rainwater flow through the site and into the ditch and experimented with trowels, pots and pans, to try to work out how to transport the rain water and mud around the site for their sculpting and mud kitchen play.
The fallen tree and branches proved popular again with the children, who spent time climbing and challenging themselves to balance and move along the branches in different ways.
We put up a slack line, which was popular with the class. They showed balance, resilience, risk taking and perseverance when trying to move themselves along the length of the slack line. It was great to see their pride in developing their skills.
The Impact of Forest School for the children is the knowledge the children have gained from the Forest School experience.
The impact can be seen through the skills, tools used, art and craft activities, observations and knowledge of the fruit, plants trees in relation to the seasons and the skills involved in learning how to play Forest School games.
Well done Chestnuts for a very busy afternoon.
