It probably looks like a large portion of our timetable is spent walking the dog but the truth is that it presents some fantastic organic learning opportunities.
Here's this season's woodland curriculum so far :
- Maps. 16-point compass reading and navigating from the natural environment. Or "I got lost on the way to the meadow and we were nearly late for gym.. let's not do that again."
- Foraging. I wasn't brave enough to trust our mushroom identification book so we stuck to blackberry collecting which resulted in some really superb muffins.
- Geo surveys. How many types of bugs/mushrooms/birds can we find on one walk? Features of the environment and why they live/grow where they do.
- Fires. Safety, how to light a fire, fire triangle and cooking stick bread at Forest School.
- Climbing. Risk assessments, how to fall and how to get a boy down from a tree when they're stuck 2m in the air and don't want to test the falling tips.
- Sticks. Finding shapes, using them as tools, tensile strength, whether they'd make good firewood and why. Throwing them for the dog. A lot.
- More sticks. Dream catchers, sling shots, swords - learning basic knots.
- Flow charts. Identifying trees from their leaves and making a flow chart identifier.
- First aid. Stings, scrapes, breaks and what's useful in an emergency (hiking essentials).
- Seasons. Signs of autumn, how the tilt of the earth's axis causes seasons.
As the nights draw in we'll do a night walk and bat hunt as well as picking up some tracking and whittling skills. I love autumn.
