Forest School for home schoolers

The children and I attended our first Forest school session with our local British homeschooling group. This is a program that is going to run 2X a month for a year and we are really looking forward to it as we had so much fun. I am not sure if they have something like this in the states, but basically it is a chance for the children to help improve the forest and learn to appreciate nature. For more information on Forest schools visit this site.



The name of our Forest school which is held at a local park.












Of course you must have a green man to watch over your forest. This is very popular over here in the UK and often represents spring time and nature.









Some pictures of the grounds of the Forest school. It is still in the process of being built and the kids are going to building their own Den before winter comes.

















The kids made these at the first sessions which we missed because we were out of town. tea lights hanging from the trees. Lots of room to play in the woods!












There will always be a camp fire and we cook our lunch here and on colder days we will be huddling around the fire I am sure:)










The first activity was getting the children to cut up vegetables and begin to make vegetable soup over the fire. This soup was cooking on the fire while the children did their forest activities activities.



Lots of yummy vegetables, carrots, mushrooms, potatoes, cabbage, leeks, parsnips, onions and herbs. Everyone brought something to add to the soup.








































Next we went into the woods and learn about coppicing hazel and ash trees. This is a method of woodland management of trees, which I had never heard of before.

First the kids were given instructions of the importance of trees and the reason why we were cutting down the trees, not to hurt them but to improve the strength of the trees and it was once done to provide straight and strong poles that could be used to make weapons, fences and other items needed for the villagers.













Showing the kids how to tell what was a hazel tree so they would cut down the correct tree!

















Instruction on how to use the saw and where to cut the tree.


Little man looks so intent, he couldn't wait to get his hands on that saw:)











The children worked in pairs to help cut down the trees































Then they had to carry the cut poles back to the Forest school as we are going to be using these trees to build our Den in the up coming sessions.










When we got back everyone had a healthy appetite for some yummy soup!












We had a lot of fun and can't wait till our next session!


I am linking this up to the Let's Hit the Road Field trip