A woodland poem: Reviewing and reflecting

Reviewing and reflecting is a really important part of what I do as a practitioner. It is also what I encourage  children and other practitioners to do so they can see their own learning and acknowledge each others achievements.

Sometimes really wonderful things come up. 

I would like to share with you this poem, written last week by four participants on a Level 3 Forest School training course. They wrote this as a review of the previous day's learning:

Our woodland 

You are the canopy of freindship

You nourish and provide

You are the root of enjoyment

You could lead and you can guide

You are the shelter and giver of warmth:

Flame kindler

Social sharer

Leaf rustler

You are the weaver of skills:

Tool talker

Tool maker

You fuel the imagination

Our woodland

If you are inspired by woodlands and haven't yet heard about the plans to sell the UK's publicly owned woodlands then do go over to www.saveourwoods.co.uk and find out more information. There is a petition against the sale of the woodlands here: www.38degrees.org.uk

Reflections on Forest Schools

In the last few weeks I have been working with people who are really trying to hone down their personal Forest School ethos statements. This has been an ongoing journey for me too and I thought I would share with you a little bit of that journey and extracts from my reflective diaries. 

I first took part in Forest School training in 2004. Before then I had been doing lots of wonderful work, where I got to play in woodlands with children and I went into Forest Schools thinking this was a qualification that just underpinned the experience I already had, which was almost true. But a significant element of what was taking place had escaped me. I saw that children were enjoying themselves and we were having fun but I had underestimated the impact we were able to have on children's lives. My reflective diary from that time says:

 "Affected by the thought that I am creating an environment in which children can 'open windows and doors' but I hadn't noticed this extra receptivity" "I know I have fully considered the effect of what I do and the relationships that the children foster with the natural environment, but I don't think I realised the impact on the emotional (and social) side of the work I do and my responsibility to the children's emotional well-being. How this realisation effects me in the future will be interesting to see."

This is one of the critical ways in which Forest School differs from all the other wonderful outdoor play and learning that takes place. There is so much good stuff that goes on in lots of schools, settings, uniformed groups and clubs but Forest Schools practitioners have this awareness of the social and emotional  impact and the outcomes for each individual child. 

The way that the practitioner develops this awareness is through their own training. A number of accredited Forest School training routes exist and the newly emerging UK Forest School National Governing body will be consolidating these. All Forest Schools should be delivered by trained practitioners. Again this doesn't mean that other people don't and shouldn't work outdoors with children. Lots of excellent good quality outdoor play and learning takes place, in lots of different settings and environments, but the deep level of knowledge that practitioners gain through training is what makes Forest Schools unique. 

What each person learns from Forest School training is individual, each person who a Forest School course arrives with their personal set of strengths and passions and, through the training, develops these. In 2008 I undertook  some further Forest School training. My reflective diary from that time:

"When I look at my life to date, the treehouses we had and the tree climbing we did as kids and wildflower walks with mum, the places I lived in my teens and early twenties, cooking on fires, collecting and chopping wood, living close to the earth and trees. Then getting jobs and work with kids, working for the Wildlife Trust, and now managing and teaching others about quality play provision, there should be nothing that I haven't the mental or physical resource for somewhere. Find the time to find it. Forest School is drawing back together those strands that have become a bit frayed of late."

Me as a smaller person, still with a stick in my hand.

I have noticed when I have been delivering Forest School training courses that this is the same for others. Their interest in the ethos is borne out of long and deep experiences but honing all that understanding and turning it into confidence takes time. 

This brings together two of those strands; On one hand the holistic development of individual children, child-centred learning and learning through play. Helping children increase their abilities and their capacity to learn, and my role in this, my own pedagogic approach. Then on the other hand the skills. That practical knowledge and ability using real tools and fire. The understanding of the environment you are in and your impact on it and how to make sure that the children you are with are kept safe from serious harm and getting the most out of that environment. 

That environment has a crucial part to play. Forest Schools are called Forest Schools for good reason. The woodland has an equal role in initiating activity, a role it shares equally with the children and with the adults. (I explore this more in this post here.) A woodland by it's very nature offers a lot; twigs, leaves, stones and cones. It is its own renewable resource for discovery. Simon Nicholson's Theory of Loose Parts (1971) is a real influence on my thinking in this area. As an architect he observed that the more flexible an environment was, the more open ended the resources in it, the more this promoted creativity in the way people used it. It's like when a child plays with the box rather than the gift, and a woodland is the gift and the box! The woodland sets up and offers so much. 

"When we crossed the stream into the woods, people's energy levels changed, everyone was excited to be in a bigger more flexible space." "It is only a little strip of woodland but it changes the atmosphere so dramatically." (reflective diary 2008)

The other environment that offers so much affordance is the beach, Nicholson gives beaches as an example of an environment that is naturally rich in loose parts for play. It will be interesting to see how the Beach Schools qualification develops nationally. It has shared ethos to Forest School but looks at transferring that to the different environment. 

The other critical factor is the time that this takes. Forest School programmes seek to work with children for the long term, giving them the time and space to develop their levels of comfort and understanding of what is possible in the woods. The first time a child has been in a woodland it can take time for them to notice the potential. Even for children who feel more confident there is a process of opening up and emerging group dynamics. It takes time to build your understanding of that child and how they are in the woods. This is true for me as a practitioner coming to work with a new group, but it is also true for the teachers, They can work with a child all year but each sees a different side to that person when they are in the woods. 

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,

 to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,

 and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau

·      

·   

The language of leaping

Even in that frantic run up to Christmas the Foundation stage children (aged three to five) who had been working on the treehouse were reflective of their experiences. The tree house building which has been recorded here and here ground to a halt when we found we had a structure that we could leap off.

The staff in the setting and I were really fascinated by the pictures of them jumping. They seemed to look so calm and so dramatic all at once. So I made some time to sit with the children looking at the pictures and reflecting on their experiences and exploring the language of leaping.

 

I really like the way their reflections involve some real emotional literacy, Frank thinking about how his future self would feel looking at a picture of himself now, Oscar talking about how he managed his emotional state at the time, Kaleb noticing his own and the emotions of others. The comments on the pictures also reflect how much fantasy and dramatic play was going on, the acting out of characters and superhero personae and the sheer volume of imaginative language around flight and flying. 

Who goes there? Who went there?

Snow that is covering lots of the UK at the moment and when I've been out and about I can't help keeping my nose to the ground looking for tracks. Walking up on the moors on Sunday (before it got so deep) we noticed a regular little round regular mark, keeping pace with some human footprints. 

It took a little while for it to dawn on me, we were following the tracks of someone walking with a stick. Further up the hill was a perfect imprint of a walking pole in the snow. We both gleefully pointed it out "look, look he dropped his stick!"

I've written before about how working with children and nature shouldn't be just about naming  but should also be about engaging and inspiring a love of the natural world. 

Children, unless they are brilliant at being still and silent, often miss the opportunity to observe birds and animals in their natural habitat. Tracks are wonderful because  they leave a record of what has happened minutes or hours before you were there. From these you can try and guess what the behaviour was that caused the tracks.

We spotted all sorts of different tracks during the course of our walk:

These large bird prints stomped resolutely down a steep slope and then even more resolutely up a steeper slope. We followed them off as they crossed our path, went round a tussock of grass, then followed a stream bed. On the really steep bits we could also see drag marks of a long tail. This has to be a bird that would choose walking over flying, to walk up such a steep slope.

This was something that had a pretty good ability to hop, and a thin tail that dragged on the ground in between it's feet. Maybe it was in a hurry as it crossed the open ground, it didn't seem to bother using it's front feet much. 

More little prints but these include smaller prints. This means it was using it's front feet as well as it's back feet. It also seems to have changed it's mind and gone backwards and and forwards a few times.

Then with a 'hop, hop, wiggle' it has gone down a hole and under the snow. To try and work out what was going on in some off the prints we even did the actions of what we thought would have made them, looking back at our own prints or imagining and acting out what the animal would be doing to leave prints behind like this. 

For children, especially those children who learn kinaesthetically, moving and wiggling around is an engaging way to learn about wildlife; what it does, and why it might be doing it.  Focussing on the behaviour rather than just naming the owner can give you entertaining insights into what is going on around us all the time, we just don't normally see the evidence.

There are lots of  guides to UK animal signs available, some can be downloaded from here and here. The Field Studies Council produce a wonderful laminated fold out guide which I find really easy to understand and especially great for lots of children to look together. All the information is laid out rather than being on lots of separate pages. I find Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature and Survival for Children  really inspiring. Although it is an American book he does a lot to encourage the tracker to think like the animal and observe behaviour from tracks.

Mud and sand are also brilliant mediums for recording who and what has gone before you. I was first really inspired by tracking when I went out into the Namib desert with a tracker called France. Just listening to him I wanted to know everything he knew. He could tell from the sand who had walked next to who, whether it was an old man or a young man or woman. He could tell exactly where the lizard was hiding out, how quickly the oryx were travelling and he told us the most useful skill  a tracker possesses is to tell who exactly had been laying in the sand next to your wife. He had such a keen observational sense it made me look around me in a completely different way.

If the only footprints you find around where you live are from cats, dogs and humans then track them! Early mornings or after a fresh snowfall are best, before it gets too confusing. You might spot some tracks on a roof like these that Emma of Sew Recycled saw. The drag marks are from a slinking belly, the paws neatly walking in file, it looks like someone is stalking the birds.

On the left are some prints from a rabbit or hare, the four marks made by the small front feet and the long back feet, I always think they look a bit like a spooky face, so I couldn't resist some additions of my own:

Wrap up warm if it is snowing near you and go and see who and what has been wandering around when you weren't looking.

The builders take a break

As the children had their lunch I went up to the treehouse site (if you are new to this project then catch up here and here). I wanted to check things over and see what things looked like without half a dozen small bodies on top of the walls and door frame. A group of girls came out after their lunch and watching them playing in the treehouse distracted me so I didn't get a chance to get any tools out. As more and more children arrived they climbed up and over the walls, which being made from pallets are like ladders.

It wasn't long before the first person tried an experimental leap.

There are a number of blue crash mats in the garden and a teacher and I dragged them over to the treehouse. Another child leapt, then another.

What fascinated me is the play behaviours that I observed in these children, who are aged four and five were identical to the play that takes place on self-build adventure playgrounds. I spent some time as manager of an adventure playground and this sort of deep play was common. Deep play, is defined by Bob Hughes in his  book A Playworkers Taxonomy of Play Types, 1996 London, PLAYLINK, UK  as  play which allows the child to encounter risky or even potentially life threatening experiences, to develop survival skills and conquer fear. 

There is a view that this sort of play is uncommon in  the early years stage but there was nothing that I could perceive that distinguished this from the play behaviours of  much older children. For some they were truly overcoming some deep fears and apprehension, their trepidation palpable as they climbed for the first time and stood on the top of the pallet. Others, seeing another child leap, were straight up and over, crashing into the mat. Some would jump from a sitting position. Each child, assessing, choosing and managing their own level of risk taking. Their confidence building with each turn they leapt again and again.

One boy was desperate to be part of the leaping but his fears kept overcoming him. He would climb on the pallet, getting higher each time before deciding it was too high, climbing down and coming to lean against me. I tried to help him recognise the achievement of climbing to the top and the teacher encouraged him to try jumping from a sitting position, as others were. He climbed again but didn't jump, instead he chose to swing down on the door frame. For him this was a challenge as great as leaping in the air from the top of the pallet. What constitutes deep play will always be different for every child. He reminded me of a group of boys at the Adventure Playground who built a jumping tower with platforms at different heights. One boy was involved in leaping from the lower platforms for a whole week before he climbed to the top platform. He must have spent over an hour waiting on that platform watching his friends before he felt ready. Once he had made that first leap he had overcome that fear and jumped again and again. 

What I really love about working alongside the teachers and children in this particular setting is their acceptance of the children's desire to take risks. Perry Else in his book The Value of Play, London, Continuum books 2009,  says
"The aim of deep play is not really to die but to experience the thrill of close encounter, letting us know we are fully alive and so helping us conquer our fears. Quite often when adults see children engaged in deep play they may feel compelled to intervene to keep the child safe. This then results in children who may feel unable to take risks on their own terms. We need to understand that taking risks is helpful to children in building up their resilience to the challenges of the world."

The role of the teacher and I was to make sure everyone did take any risk on their own terms, that no one felt physically or emotionally pressured to do a jump they didn't want to do. Some children watched or stood at the top of the pallet for quite sometime before they decided to leap or climb back down. With a press of bodies behind waiting for a turn it could be a challenge to give each child the space and time to decide how and what they wanted to do.

The addition of a heap of cloaks deepened the role play element of the leaping as batman, 'wonder-super-hero-girl', Ben-10, and Buzz Lightyear leaped onto the crash mats. One child's play was in the role of Ben-10 (a cartoon boy who transforms into a super-hero alien) Each leap he made was prefixed with a complex summoning of elemental forces. The control and concentration on his face reminded me of a tai chi master, so deep was his level of immersion, the stillness and control in each of his actions. 

Over the course of the afternoon they leapt, leapt and leapt again, there never seemed to be a break in the flow of children.

When I got home that night I picked up the book I was reading, which is a book of articles by the writer Tom Robbins. In this book I came across the word 'approfondement'. Robbins describes it as "a marvelous French word which roughly translates "as playing easily in the deep". That's how the afternoon had seemed, like we were playing easily in the deep.

.