This week the Chestnuts class started their session by listening to the story of ‘The Gruffalo’s Child’. We talked about how the different animals had made tracks in the snow as they moved about outside, like the animals in the story. The children also shared that they had made tracks in the snow when it fell in December.
The class set off outside into the wind, creating animal foot prints all around their outside area. After watching how to create footprints with stencils, sieves and flour; it was brilliant to see how engaged they were with having a go independently. They learned how to identify animals by their tracks. Deer have a print with 2 marks, fox have 4 paw prints and badgers have 5.
The class had a go at clearing out weeds from their gardening area. The children used rakes, trowels, buckets, wheelbarrows and gloves to help them. There was lots of interest in looking at the roots of the weeds and using magnifying glasses to look at some of the worms and insects they found. They talked about compost and put all of their weeds into the compost bins to use later on in the year to fertilise their plot.
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.
The Chestnuts are thinking about the ‘Great Fire of London’ as their learning journey this term, so today they shared their knowledge of what they had learned about the event so far. In the pouring rain, they watched as some sparks made a fire and observed it spread quickly as it did in London in 1666. They talked about fire safety and what a fire needs to burn; fuel, spark, air.
They discussed the materials and their properties that the houses were built with, how they were so close together and how this led to the spread of the fire. The children were very observant, watching how the fire changed as it spread, seeing smoke and sparks jumping from one building to another. Finally we used some water to extinguish the fire completely at the end of the session.
