This week we celebrated Diwali by making clay diwas. We decorated the clay with natural materials, berries, flowers, leaves and seeds. It’s amazing what you can find foraging around in the woodland! The children used tweezers to help create a pattern around the outside of the pot.
They really did look beautiful!
Storm Debi did force us to retreat inside for some of the time, but some groups were able to complete the activity outside!
Once all were completed, we put a tea light inside, lit the candles and finished with a Diwali song. Happy Diwali!
This week in forest schools we thought about the meaning of Poppy Day and why we wear poppies at this time of year. So, whenever we see a poppy, we know that we ‘remember’ but we also ‘hope’ for a time when there are no wars. After we made a poppy we lit a candle and took a few minutes to think about people in Ukraine and Israel.
Our finished poppies are on display in the Year 1 outdoor shelter if you want to come and look.
We made poppies from sticks and wool. First we wrapped black wool around the sticks. Then we added some fluffy redwood and weaved it around each stick! It was a challenge for some, but everybody competed the challenge and was proud of their poppy!
Can you spot our robin? He is getting really tame and comes to visit us in forest schools!
During forest school, we see a robin in the trees above, and sometimes the robin hops around us, looking for food. So this week we are thinking about what a robin eats, and also how we can feed our birds in winter, when the food is not so plentiful.
The first question was “What does a robin eat?” We worked out that our robin must be an omnivore, as it likes mealworms and berries!
We took it in turns to put a small handful of mealworms in a tray for the robin. Some children were keener to do this than others!
We used the Merlin App on the iPad to record birdsong in the trees above. The app indentified the robin’s song!
This App is worth downloading on your phone, as it’s so easy to use and will identify many different birds by recording their songs. The link is here https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org
We them started to make our bird feeders. The first job was to find a stick to go through a hole in a cardboard tube. This is the perch for a visiting bird.
We coated the cardboard tube with margarine, like we were spreading butter on our toast!
We then sprinkled over a mixture of bird seeds over the margarine to make a turn the cardboard into a tasty treat for our robin.
And finally, we selected a suitable place for each bird feeder to hang, with help from Mrs Whittaker.
As we celebrate Harvest in school, in forest schools we went on a pumpkin hunt around school! We had clues to read, which helped us find the next pumpkin.
In Spring, we will plant our pumpkin seeds and hope that next Autumn we will have our home grown pumpkins to harvest!
Clue 1: What’s in the envelope O’Shea?
Here we are finding our way to the first pumpkin!
Our next clue
Let’s go to the fort!
Where are we going now? To the Hive!
The next pumpkin was hard to find, you need to crawl to find this one!
Now we need to find where the strawberries grow!
Now to an apple tree! Easy!
Off to the pond! We hope the pumpkin is not IN the pond…
Next clue. Where is the ground coloured blue?
And finally our last pumpkin!
We counted, sorted, decided on our favourite pumpkin, and then enjoyed a reward for all our pumpkin work!
This week we collected 3 different shaped leaves from the woodland for leaf printing. We carefully covered the back of the leaf with paint and then printed onto a piece of paper. With great excitement, we carefully peeled the leaf off, to reveal a print showing the veins!
Here is a slideshow of our work in forest schools this week
At Allerton CE Primary we are fortunate to have extensive grounds around the school, and this year my role is lead Forest School sessions with our Year 1 children. I take groups of children into our woodland area for planned sessions that enable the children to engage and explore the natural environment.
These are the activities so far:
We explored our woodland area to find 6 natural objects. We looked carefully to see what we had found and then played a memory game ( Kim’s game)
We found evergreen leaves and punched shapes in the leaves using a decorative hole punches.
We self register on our evergreen tree by hanging our own small log decoration on the tree.
Our best sessions are when it’s raining! We have waterproof trousers and jackets to wear and a canopy over the log seats.
This week we searched for tree seeds and planted up pots, ready for germination in the spring. We went on seed gathering hunt, and spotted lots of berries too.
