Autumn Learning - STEM

Getting Both Outdoor Learning and Forest School ready for the next few months when the days shorten and the weather turns cold is a busy time. Getting the actual spaces ready as well as the activities is a juggle, fitting in the prep and planning around actually taking the children for sessions is almost impossible! A lot of thinking on your feet is required! And involving the children is a given.

The Wildlife Garden is by no means ready but the bare bones of what is needed is in place to build on. This was achieved by two weeks of 3 Forest School sessions a day for four days each week, including all classes from Year 1 to Year 6, and laying the foundations of how the area needs to be looked after. The children also joined in the maintenance and improvements to the area. A sudden 'Indian Summer' sent the temperature up and the sunshine out and the children's enthusiasm blossomed. 

Obviously, after both a six week Summer break for some, and a 5 month break from school from pre-lockdown for most, this month is a return to school after a very unusual Summer for all. Outdoor Learning has helped the transition back into the school environment, back into learning, and back into enjoying the curriculum.

This week we moved to a different area on Chartham School grounds. Here we have much more scope for den building as well as a huge Mud Kitchen! The children are beginning to see the advantages and differences in the Wildlife Area and here. Neither is better, both offer a range of learning experiences, and some activities will remain the same, and for this fortnight they will get to explore new experiences also.... before we move on to yet another area in our School Grounds!

This basecamp is in a much more physical space. In the Wildlife Garden we are visiting the creatures that live there. There is no space to run and climb, but there is opportunity to bug hunt, pond dip, lizard spot, and make space for the elusive hedgehogs and snakes that visit. You can listen to birds and plant flowers. You can build a den of sticks and enjoy and immerse yourself in nature. It's perfect for natural science links to the curriculum. 

By the Mud Kitchen there are trees you can climb, bushes to hide in, and mud to revel in. You can make paths and dens with sticks and bricks, you can swing on ropes, role tyres, and dig holes...It lends itself to science and maths quiet easily. 
With the 'Great Chartham Bake Off' that the children instigated this week, the challenge was to find the right consistency for mud to actually stand as a cake! 

 

Pupils soon diversified into a 'Master Chef' spin off and created stew, soup, salad, and all kinds of 'dishes'. 

The children quickly became very adept at mixing the right quantities for their task, trouble shooting the ones that went wrong, and amending their recipes!

Some children took this to an art form and created their own 'Mud Slime' to play with!

Those who chose to build a restaurant alongside the kitchen had very similar challenges! The bricks needed mortar, something to 'glue' them together, creating the correct viscosity suddenly became easier when they found a patch of sandy soil! 

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They also needed to map out the space they wanted, estimate the bricks required, use a stacking pattern that would make the wall strong, and discover how useful a 'lintel' is!

They needed to work as a team and communicate effectively - and from year 1 to year 6 all managed it pretty well!

There will always be a space set aside for quiet activities for those who want to reflect, but if you want to explore the environment inside and out - this is the space to do it!

I know - the fire pit is NOT a play area! Children who wanted to enjoy leaf hunting and making the most of the emerging Autumn colours didn't go up to the centre but asked for the tools they needed to identify a leaf or tree. They created their own leaf art elsewhere also! AND created Mud Ink to write notes...

The 'rule' most struggle with is 'leave the forest as you found it'. 

Forest School's version of 'Tidy Up Time!', which is rarely popular, but really necessary so that whoever comes to the following session arrives to an enticing environment and not a mess! Even sticks and bricks need to be treated with a level of respect! After all it is a Learning Area - an Outdoor Classroom to be shared.

Involving the children in the creation of designated spaces gives them ownership and a sense of responsibility. This week, with discussion, we all created a Dig Pit (an area to hunt for treasure) and the start of a Village. Dens are available to build, and separate some of the children into groups. Some pupils don't appreciate this and wanted spaces to play that created a community.

Outdoor Learning covers the entire curriculum. In the last 12 months Chartham grounds has hosted mini Pyramid building, 3D map making, Roman Bread Baking (photo below), Survival Skills needed to be an Explorer, Maths measuring on a large scale, Poetry Inspiration, hosting Winter Tales by the campfire, and provided a landscape to draw... plus much, much more. The possibilities of extending and including more areas of learning expands constantly. If Outdoors Learning was left to Forest School alone a lot of rich experiences would be missed. 

Some of these experiences will be the result of collaboration between class teachers and the Forest School Leader, a simple chat can frequently make an outdoor idea a lesson reality. This week Year 3 have been listening to the sounds of birds in the classroom. Each day they're introduced to a different Forest School RSPB soft-toy Bird (photo below), and listen to and compare the song it sings. They have taken the opportunity when outside to use their new knowledge to seek out both birds and song while in the School Grounds. Selecting spaces they felt the birds would be and listening carefully for a bird they could identify.

Strengthen those listening and concentrating skills should transfer back into the classroom nicely.

We were also able to use this experience as an RSPB Wild Challenge. 

While Forest School remains a very fluid entity, with minimal planning, following the interests of the children, planned Outdoor Learning will often be fulfilling a key learning intention, usually in a more meaningful and memorable way.

The freedom of following your interest in Forest School leads to all different kinds of discovery that would be difficult to plan. This week two Year 6 boys were fascinated by the microscope attachment to my phone and they delved into looking very closely at the leaves, and rocks, and wood around them.

It's an opportunity any child could take up but would be difficult to do with 30 pupils! Forest School allows for that extension more freely, the opportunity to take an idea and go with it! In this specific case, the chance to see the world in a whole new perspective! 

 

These are the pictures that they took:

One or two other children wanted to see, declared it 'cool', and wandered off! These boys, each from a different class, went off to seek things they wanted to see in more detail, each spent 20 minutes+ twisting and turning their found objects into focus and describing what they could see. This led to speculation of why these things were actually this way in the first place, and a foraging into the information books for answers.

Next week we can build on this, with the same activities because repeating is imprinting, and extending opportunities to go further: More information. Bug boxes to look at minibeasts close up. More magnifiers to help general exploration, maybe a mini outdoor science lab....?

Who knows?

Let's see what another week of Forest School brings!