Year Two Forest School; Term Spring 2

Forest School - Spring Term 2 2013/2014

Year 2 – Miss Western’s Class

Session 1

As today was the last day of winter we looked for signs of Spring in Forest School.  Some plants already had buds on them.  We discussed how hibernating creatures such as hedgehogs would be coming out of hibernation.  We talked about the types of foods that hedgehogs eat and had a look in Forest School to see if there was enough food to sustain hedgehogs.  We discovered that it was much harder to find food than it was in the summer.

Because it was raining during our session we had a couple of activities to keep us warm.  Year 1 had made a big den up against our pallets which are to be used as a bug hotel so we needed to move those.  There was also a pile of soil on the edge of the Junior School field which needed moving to the mud pit.

There was also time to look for the plants and objects in Forest School using photographs of things that we might not have previously noticed.

For some of us the mud was too tempting to resist!

Session 2

Planting trees was the main focus of our session.  The focus for our Comenius project is improving our outdoor areas and part of this involves developing Forest School.  The first job we had was to remove a large pile of branches that were at the bottom of Forest School, which is where we wanted to plant the trees.  We all worked as a team and got the job done quickly.

We had 5 trees to plant.  We dug holes deep enough to hold the root ball and fed them with some manure to help them grow.  We then filled in the hole with soil and compost.  We planted some primroses round the base of the trees.

Thank you to Mrs Bishop, who came in to help us with our planting.

We also did some litter picking to tidy up Forest School.  After all this work we were ready for our snack!

Session 3

We spoke about the sculptures we had made when we looked at Banksy’s work and discussed the theme of normal objects in unusual settings.  We were challenged to make mud sculptures on this theme.

‘A snowman in a tree’

 

‘A pancake on a pallet’

Some of us chose to experiment with other materials we found in Forest School to make our own sculptures.

                 ‘Mini mountain’                                    ‘Scissors’

There was also time for us to take part in some of our favourite Forest School activities such as looking for mini-beasts, making a den for Bobby and painting.