Play in my sessions

Anyone who has ventured into my inside classroom at school will see that I enjoy being creative, having fun and making things as enjoyable and memorable as possible - even if I appear to be on the crazier side of creative!

Running an initial 6 week pilot has allowed me to explore the use if play for both learning and development. I have attempted to implement it in a variety of ways.

Games:

• "   Ice-breaker games/ check-in activity to ensure children feel part of the greater group and feel safe that we are all there together.
• "   Exploring the area and boundaries through using 1,2, 3 where are you? Children enjoy the challenge of finding good hiding places and beginning to get to know the area really well. This is a game that has been a huge hit with the children I am working with. They ask to play it every week and although there are other things that I have wanted to try with them, I have gone with it and they have enjoyed it and included it in their reflective blog posts most weeks. It has also been great for the children to realise that the game has become harder for the seekers each week as the trees and bushes have gone from small buds to full leaf.
• "   Find me games – 5 seconds to find something yellow. Again this game makes the children look closely at their surroundings as they have a mission to find something.

Imagination and creativity:

Quiet space: we decided to find our own quiet / sacred places within our forest area. The only rule was that it should be a small distance from each other. The children enjoyed exploring different places and then began to decorate and make their sacred, and often imaginative, places special to them. I had no idea that they would get so into this. Their imaginations really took hold as doorbells, doormats and hanging decorations were fashioned to make their place their own. Following on from this we spent between 3 and 5 minutes (I didn’t time it) sitting in our quiet space and listening to and looking at nature. This provided much needed quiet time for my very chatty and loud class who were all then completely buzzing about what they had experienced. Following on from this activity I received a letter from a parent saying how much calmer and more organised their son was after Forest School. The children have really learnt about respecting each other’s places and looking after and keeping organised their own spaces and understanding a little more about their culture and society through acting out all through imaginative play, as well as learning more about their natural surroundings. 

Entering our Forest School: each session we leave by the fire exit from the classroom and walk over to where our FS shed is going to be erected (hopefully soon) and then instead of heading straight over to the base camp, we enter via a woven path exploring the nature we see along the way: identifying species, holding branches and passing messages, sometimes health and safety ones, on along the line, and also noting how things are changing and growing across the seasons. Along the way we pass, “O’ Mighty Tree” – which is a tree with a lovely gnarled and interesting trunk; that looks like great eyes watching over the forest. We always stop and bow down to O’ Mighty Tree and ask permission to enter and repeat when leaving at the end of the session. Again the children have really bought into this and enjoy my silly rhymes that they repeat to the tree. This is creating empathy with the forest and learning about respect through play. Through my modelling using our imaginations for a sacred tree it I feel it is almost like giving the children permission to make believe.