Mama Beech

I'm sitting in a friend's dining room with huge mug of tea. She and her family are 'night owls' and I'm definitely an 'early bird'. It's 8am and she and I got to bed about 6 hours ago after a great dinner party and an overdue catch up in her new home. So now, the house is still, I have my cuppa, and I'm silently watching her snow covered garden. There are silent Crows and Magpies flitting up and down from grass to treetops, Sparrows performing aerobatic tumbles, and a Blackbird overturning leaves in pursuit of a sheltering bug, while Goldfinches zip past them at speed.  The snow is a messy mass of footprints, shadowy dips, and piled ridges. None of them human made. I can trace the journey the fox took from right to left along the edge of the patio and back again. I can see scurrying marks and holes the squirrels have left, and an assortment of pigeon footprints lead me to wonder if they were joining in with 'Strictly Come Dancing' last evenin...

We are in a very scenic part of Kent (see the Explore Kent photo below), just within the boundaries of a designated Area Of Outstanding Beauty. It's green rolling hills and stunning cathedral city, Trees and nature all around, birdsong and tractors causing traffic jams on a daily basis! I have no idea how the prolific orchards and vineyards around us manage their land because for us, it's hard work! Every now and then the children rediscover the rocks in the Dig Pit. In all honesty, it's not just at the Dig Pit. We are based on top of a hill which I think is an undiscovered solid flint MOUNTAIN (as that's the only reasonable explanation for the quantity!), and once you strip off the topsoil you hit the rocks! This makes gardening with the children a little fraught, it takes a heavy toll on the digging tools, and opens up a huge world of imagination, history, geography, geology, and interest for the children. Every flint nodule we dig up is a 'tooth'. The specula...

Everything has its pros and its cons. Every job has good tasks and annoying tasks. Every week has productive days and slow days. Forest School sessions have their ups and downs. This week has been the perfect example of that! It has been gloriously sunny, that equinox weather that comes twice a year, cold mornings, sometimes even frosty, followed by a clear blue day and rising temperatures that mean you end up carrying half your clothing home in a bag! Layers are the secret to all Forest School dressing! After a bright and cheerful weekend, I arrived at basecamp on Monday to find we'd had visitors. To use the legal term we'd had trespassers. This happens way too often. Mostly it's very minor disruption. I have to remove their empty alcohol bottles, their food wrappers, stand up all the log stools, put basecamp back into a circle, and check over the site. Obviously, all the time muttering to myself because it eats into my set-up time and makes me nervous about what I might h...

Like everything in education, budget dictates. There are lots of projects, schemes, plans, ideas, and pedagogies that schools can adopt to focus on. Many will indeed improve school performance, or children's learning, or make day to day life a little easier for staff. None of them come with a guarantee. All of them require training or membership, a one-off payment or a subscription. When a school considers implementing Forest School it isn't any different. It is true that it is an investment rather than a charge . Whatever is decided upon is introduced to improve an aspect of school. A maths scheme of work to ensure everything is covered. A literacy programme to make it easier for all staff to use the same tools. Buying in PE trainers to improve the activities provided, to outsource the planning, and to cover PPA times for some or all staff. Whatever the cost, the aim is to enhance what the school provides. Forest School is a pedagogy, but sessions are a 'service', boug...

There are quite a few words for 'teaching'. Instruct. Demonstrate. Drill. Direct. Lecture... Words that conjure imparting knowledge to be demonstrated back somehow. The curriculum relies on this, the repeating of this knowledge is how data is collected to prove how successful the 'teaching' has been. And frequently these words can describe what happens in Forest School. We instruct how to climb trees. We demonstrate how to use tools. We drill safety rules for all to memorise. We direct activities, usually subtlety, but we steer them towards discoveries we know are waiting. And on request, we can give a lecture on information on bugs or trees or birds... Most of the time at Forest School 'teaching' looks like mentoring, fostering, participation, modeling, listening, engaging, facilitating... Children see us much more as equals outdoors, all exploring together. They will bring ideas and ask questions. We extend their investigations, encourage their endeavours, joi...