Nurture in Nature Forest School, Harpenden, Herts, United Kingdom.

The woods were filled with music this week 🎶 as we used palm drills to make some
musical instruments. The children showed great perseverance and developed their hand eye coordination as they carefully drilled their holes before threading their string and beads. We also made shakers using Y shaped sticks.

It was lovely to welcome everyone back for the first sessions of the new year this week. We created some pine cone and twig owls, pretended to be birds and owls as we flapped around the woods collecting ‘worms’ with our peg beaks, enjoyed painting with feathers and made some bird feeders to ensure we look after the birds during the winter months.

Our last session of the year saw lots of tool use to create Christmas tree decorations. We used peelers to whittle elder to make nature candles, we hammered nails and then weaved wool to make a star and we followed a trail to find Christmas treasure in the woods!
Wishing all of our families a very Happy Christmas and looking forward to more adventures in 2022! 🌲

This week was campfire week - after learning about what is needed to make a fire and how to move around the fire circle safely, we enjoyed cooking our damper bread. This was a great opportunity to build our patience as we discovered bread takes a lot longer to cook than previous campfire snacks and then we developed our decision making skills by choosing what to put in our warm bread once it was ready!

It was a tuneful week in the woods as we learnt all about the different sounds birds make. We listened carefully to different bird songs, identified different types of birds, looked for birds in our woods, made peg birds and created some bird feeders to hang in our gardens to look after our local birds.

The woods was filled with an array of colourful and imaginative stick people this week. The children enjoyed using the peelers to whittle a stick before transforming it in to their own stick person and creating homes for them at the bottom of various tree stumps. We also created a sensory stick each
using eucalyptus and rosemary and bells to explore our different senses.

Celebrating the many recent festivals of light - Diwali, Bonfire night and Saint Martin in the woods this week. We enjoyed creating beautiful nature lanterns, nature sparklers and nature art inspired by rangoli patterns - lots of opportunity for creativity, imagination, concentration and loose part play!

There was a chill in the air as we returned to our classes this week, but we were busy looking for beautiful spiders webs glistening in the sunshine around the woods, using tools to make our own conker spider webs and enjoying hole punching our colourful autumn leaves to create a little bit of magic. These little people bring so much energy, joy and fun to the woods each week 🍁🕸🕷

Delicious apples 🍎 were the theme this week. Celebrating the apple harvest we had fun printing with apples, using a peeler, corer, slicer tool to prepare apples to eat and one of our all time favourite activities - using fire strikers and cooking our apples on the campfire🔥 Risky play is such an important part of Forest School and this week the children showed great care and focus when dealing with fires and tools.

I love the arrival of the autumnal colours in the woods, we had lots of fun celebrating the arrival of autumn by making conker necklaces and colour matching leaves. We learnt how to use the conker clamps and auger drills to make a hole, before using needles to refine our threading skills - lots of fine motor skills, hand eye coordination and perseverance this week!

Autumn is on its way, we’ve been enjoying looking for signs that autumn is coming - from hunting for the mushrooms that have appeared in the woods to noticing the change in the colour of the leaves. We planted bluebell bulbs to grow, created our own nature crowns and made our own bog babies and habitats - sessions full of creativity and observational skills.

We enjoyed a touch of magic in the woods this week! We used the peelers to whittle elder to make wands and then decorated them with feathers found in the woods before adding a touch of colour. Everyone was very busy creating petal potions, developing our mixing and pouring skills and learning how to work as a team. We also couldn’t resist taking advantage of the seasonal blackberries growing at the moment and enjoyed using blackberry juice to create our own tie dye.