Brentwood Preparatory School Incipe 2017-18

Forest School this year has been an incredible experience and journey for all involved. Although I may be the ‘teacher’ the real teachers are the children and they have taught me so much. The best lesson from them is to see with new eyes and to enter into their world instead of them entering into our ‘adult’ world. When we’re at Forest School, a brick is not just a brick, it’s a yoga balancing beam; a wet slippery surface becomes an air hockey table with a stick; and mud puddles become potions and bug swimming pools. Did you know the fallen tree in Bayman Woods has taken us to the moon this term and has even become part of Rapunzel’s hair? We’ve explored so much of our imaginations and begun exploring the use of tools to help us make things from the natural resources that Bayman Woods provides us. So far we have made bows and arrows, magical wands and shaman sticks. We’ve used our drills to make spinning spaceships, whittled sticks with vegetable peelers and used the very cool rubber mallet to mark our boundary with ‘stop signs’. We have bought elements of the classroom outside and made our own clay fossils. We’ve followed animal tracks and learned how to tell the difference between animal prints and who we may be sharing the forest with. We’ve played with maths and built a ‘stick throwing stadium’, making predictions of which types of stick would fly the farthest and why and found all the different shapes we could to sort into groups. We’ve looked at the life cycle of frogs and made our own frog spawn. We’ve built birds’ nests and pretended to be baby birds learning how to find food. We have explored, learned, played and discovered so much. No two sessions are the same. The children always lead the sessions in the most wonderful natural ways. They feel a sense of freedom and independence. Their self confidence and self esteem grows tree-mendously (see what I did there?!) and they’re always experiencing a constant sense of achievement. I could write forever about Forest School and the joy it brings us all, but I’ll just leave you with this; close your eyes and think back to one of your happiest childhood memories. Can you remember the weather? The smells? How you felt? More often than not, our earliest memories are when we were outdoors, playing and experiencing nature. There is always more to discover every time we leave the house. The natural world is a wonderful classroom. Forest School 33 Brentwood School Preparatory