St Charles, 13.01.21& 14.01.21

The icy rain took its toll on our sessions this week. To call them forest school would contravene the trade descriptions act; instead it was mainly craft in the breezy hall or running around outside. Y3 went first and began wool wrapping sticks. There were a lot of grumbles initially, generally along the lines of “its too difficult” because of the tying but we all persevered and the children were pleased with their efforts. We didn’t have enough time to complete them and so we’ll finish off the sticks next week.

Y4’s topic is Vikings and so I took the opportunity of access to a laptop to have a little lesson about something that we could carry through into forest school. We learned about viking runes, about the Bluetooth logo and King Harald Bluetooth who has captured the imagination of some. The children had a go at writing in runes and chose runic symbols for the wooden pendant that they can create in our forest school sessions. The boys chose the symbols for warrior and journey; the girls chose the symbols for partnership and joy - interesting! We sheltered under the canopy to learn about the safe use of a laplander saw. This helped us to prepare for the coming few weeks when we’ll be sawing a log to make our own wooden discs. A few of them had a practice at sawing through the cold, wet wood which was difficult.

The afternoon brought more rain and the infant bubble. We went onto the playground for some games as the fields were just too slippy for running. We kicked off with stick challenges: firstly to find random sticks and then to put those sticks into size order. That was a tricky task, particularly for the youngest as there was quite a bit of spatial working out to do. The second challenge was to find a suitable stick for wool wrapping. As Edward Scissorhands is to cutting, so the staff and I were to tying, and we worked like fiends, madly tying knots to facilitate the making of some rather marvellous yarn sticks. Again we’ll finish those off next week.

Thursday with Y5/6 was similar in terms of activity. We went out to collect sticks and have a play. Two or three of them had a great time, ‘getting stuck’ in a muddy hole and dragging each other out of it, however some of them were there under sufferance and walked around miserably in the rain! We had hot chocolate and biscuits and our check-in chat today wandered onto the disparate topics of pet ownership and missing friends during lockdown. After some reminders from me about how to tie (plus an absolutely no-nonsense reminder from Mr B that certain people did in fact very much know how to tie!), the children made some yarn sticks and some managed to add decorative flourishes of feathers, buttons and beads.