Forest School – Class 2

We started our session practising either our sink and fade skills and our eye contact skills like those of great predators. Having honed our abilities we concentrated on the animals. We went down to the stream and gathered some clay to make models of our own predators or prey.

We had all sorts of creatures, rabbits, foxes, bears and owls as well as homes and nests for them to live in.

We even had the ferocious predator ladybird larvae come to join us and a very active beetle!

In this session we discussed food chains and the importance of plants even to top predators as the creatures they rely on for food invariably rely on plants for theirs. We also discussed how some plants can also have medicinal properties. We made ourselves some healing plantain ointment to take home for our scrapes and bruises and seeing as we had a fire lit, we made some popcorn noting it was made from a grain and totally plant based.

When group (a) were making their ointment rain began to fall.  Seeing as it has been so dry recently we decided that this needed to be encouraged and some very serious rain-dancing began to see if we could make it last all night!

Group (b) had lots of sunshine for their session so we made some sticky weed juice drink to help cool us down.

This session we have been concentrating on birds; first of all predator birds of prey in our games, discussing owls, hawks and other raptors and what characteristics they share, then the nests they might build in a woodland habitat.

We built ourselves a giant nest we could all fit in, lining it with soft comfy leaves. Then we imagined ourselves as noisy, hungry chicks before sitting still and listening to see how many real birds we could hear around us.

Next we looked around for a special place and each built our own little nest. When we were finished, we gathered around each one to see and hear what everybody else had done.

As class 2 are doing ‘Predators and Prey’ as their topic this term, we spent our first session back in Kiln Wood looking at camouflage.

Taking our role very seriously we camouflaged our faces, then half the group went off to see how well they could blend into the background. Once they were all camouflaged in, the other half came over to see whom they could spot. Then we swapped over so everyone got a chance to both hide and seek!

Everybody was very good at staying incredibly still and quiet making it hard to spot each other!

We finished with a snack and discussed the merits of camouflage.