This week the children were excited to get to forest school and begin their day. As we walked through our site, the children spotted a huge nest in the tree. We wondered what type of bird may have built the nest. The children thought it could possibly be a sparrow, a blue tit or even a seagull!
Once we arrived on site, the children helped to set up our camp for the day and we talked about our plans. Some children wanted to build dens whilst others wanted to build houses and towers. We got to work quickly and the motto of the day was ‘team work makes the dream work!’, as the children supported one another moving the large branches into place. The recent storms had supplied us with a lot of differing sizes of branches and they were all used to create a variety of different structures.
The children enjoyed experimenting with the branches. How could we create walls and roofs? Some children wanted to have a tall structure by placing sticks up high and hoping they would balance without touching the ground. They soon realised this would not work and they introduced longer sticks which were supported on the ground to create enclosures.
As we looked around for more sticks, we could hear the beautiful singing of the birds all around us but strangely we were unable to see any birds. One child suggested we collect lots of worms as birds love worms, whilst another suggested we look at different areas of forest school. The adult, who knows our forest school well, thought this was a wonderful opportunity to introduce the children to a part of forest school they had never been to before…the very top of the high hill! The children were very excited to explore and off we set. We had to manoeuvre around fallen branches and holes and negotiate a safe route up the hill. As we reached the top, we were all amazed to see the whole of our forest school site from a completely different perspective. We could see for miles!
We had some spotter sheets with us which we looked at as we tried to identify the wildlife around us. We spotted a wood pigeon, magpie and blackbird. Some children thought they might have spotted a fox. How exciting would that be?
After lunch we went on an adventure in search of the orange river. As we arrived, the children were quick to point out the troll bridge. Who was brave enough to walk across? Some of the children decided to tiptoe over the bridge whilst others wanted to stamp to wake up the troll. We decided to split into two groups and the children who wanted to tiptoe over the bridge went first. Phew! We didn’t wake the troll. The other group then ran, stamped, screamed and shouted at the top of their voice as they ran over the bridge and they DID wake the troll! Run everyone!