Woodland Structures

I'd previously never thought too much about the structures of woodlands but I can now see the different structures and how they work and how they are different in the species that they have - because of the particular structure they are.

Woodlands can be looked at in reference to both their horizontal and vertical structures.

The horizontal structure of British woods is looking at how dense the woodland is - how close together the trees are.

Trees may be wild and cramped together forming dense woodland in contrast, when woodland is closely managed and planned, trees can be evenly spaced.

The location of the forest can impact on the denseness and distribution of the trees; alongside environmental aspects including: drainage, moisture, soil type and whether it is flat or on a slope.

Woodlands can change relatively quickly following rom large trees dying and areas being cleared to then have saplings flourish; creating different areas within the woodland.

Wild / cramped together

Evenly spaced

Evenly spaced with gaps

Uneven with gaps

Looking at the vertical structure of vegetation, working upwards the first layer – often taken for granted, is the ground layer. This layer, which is less than 2cm from the ground, consists of mosses, lichens, ivy and fungi. Alongside this on the woodland floor there are rotting leaves and vegetation; a microhabitat for invertebrates – including woodlice and centipedes. We have all of these at our forest school site – but you may needs to look closely! There are some lovely examples of fungi on the tree stumps of the cut down trees – it smells very mushroomy! Children should be reminded of health and safety when exploring; some fungi is poisonous and some children can have an allergic reaction to ivy.

The next layer up is commonly called the field layer – which comprises of vegetation between 2cm and150cm. This layer is home to ferns and flowering plants, including wood anemone, horse tails and lots of different grasses. It can often be thought of grass as all being the same but it can be a lovely activity for children to identify similarities and differences between the different grasses in our forest school – ‘Forest School Vision’ needed!

Above the field layer is the shrub layer – ranging from 1.5 metres to 4.5 metres. This layer is composed of shrubs which are happy to grow in limited light. These include: blackberry, elder, hawthorn, hazel and field maple – these can all be found in our Forest School area. Alongside these could be sapling from canopy trees. This layer provides a wealth of shelter and food for a wide-range of mammals, insects and birds.

Finally the highest part of the British woodland is the canopy layer – which is roughly anything over 4.5 metres. This is the realm of the dominant trees: oak, ash, beech and birch (for example). These tree receive the maximum amount of light available and therefore control the climate beneath them in the lower layers of woodland.

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.

Evaluating research carried out in relation to Forest School

So in theory Forest School sounds ideal for developing the children of today to become all round great learners – but where is the evidence?

There have been numerous studies that have taken place around the benefits of Forest School; here are summaries of two of them.

A Critical review of research and literature exploring the relationship of the child with the natural world – Rowena Kenny 2010

·         growing dissociation of children from the natural environment ·         tension between biological drives and the socio-political contexts of modern culture ·         Nature Deficit Disorder ·         renaturing of childhood Kenny’s research is to explore why there is a need for Forest School. She goes back to research humans’ inherent biological need for nature – including our need for a connection with our environment. Western society has progressed to an extent that children don’t have the opportunities to develop this relationship, in the way that they did historically, and will subsequently not be able to see the need to preserve the natural world as they don’t have that connection. Alongside this, she discussed the need for children to be re-naturalised and hypothesized that common childhood issues including obesity and ADD/ADHD could be due to NDD – Nature Deficiency Disorder.

The benefits of a forest school experience for children in their early years – Sam Massey for NFER 2005

This study was to get an all-round view of the forest school experience and what they were gaining from it. It was also to ascertain if forest school provides skills and confidence for a child’s lifelong learning and to gain an insight into the types of learning experiences being offered and the relation to the EYFS. The study was thorough and used a variety of methods for the research including interviews, questionnaire and videos of the children during a Forest School session. The resulting findings from the research highlighted that forest school programmes: evolve from the needs of the child and includes the child’s interests; develop good self-esteem in a climate of small achievable steps; provides a real context for developing language; provides the practitioner with an alternative view of the child and further insights into a child’s particular development; are beneficial to a child’s all-round development, particularly in the areas of personal, social and emotional development, and language and communication; underpin the principles laid down in the foundation stage guidelines; have been very well received by all those involved in it; provides opportunities for the children to take risks, solve problems and employ thinking skills; complements learning in the classroom and can be transferred. It was an interesting insight also into parents’ reactions to seeing their children in a Forest School session where they, “expressed their wonder at the level of independence and confidence.” Overall this was a positive piece of research backing up the benefits of the whole ethos of Forest School.

More musing on behaviour

Thinking about the impact of a learner’s positive behaviour on their own learning and development within Forest School brings me to the wealth of experiences they can build on and take with them throughout life. If they have positive behaviour they will: fully engage with the whole process; learn new knowledge about their natural world local environment, which they can then build on and explore further; develop new skills of working with and in nature, for example making shelters out of natural materials and tent pegs through whittling a piece of wood; develop survival skills; develop observation skills – not just seeing trees but being able to identify them by their twigs, bark, shape, leaf, fruit and flower; develop listening skills and thinking about the impact of humans and noise pollution; develop an understanding of looking after the natural world and how they can play a part for future generations, and take calculated risks by having a go at things they never considered they would be able to do before. All in all positive behaviour can have a huge impact on their current and future learning and development not just within Forest School but throughout life.

In comparison if a learner shows negative behaviour due to a multitude of variables both within and outside of school this can really create barriers to their learning and development. Negative behaviour can create a barrier to their learning. It’s important to try to discover reasons why they could be displaying the negative behaviour, which can be done through starting at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The learner may be showing negative behaviour because they are out of their comfort zone and have a fear of the unknown and it is important to ensure that they feel safe within the Forest School environment. Negative behaviour can impact through them being defensive about what they are doing; not opening up to new ideas; distrusting the leader or not feeling safe to take risks. All of these will mean that the learner will either stand-still or move backwards in their learning and development. For the learner to see that others are all advancing and engaging around them will then make them feel even more insecure about their own learning. They might start to feel incredibly isolated from the group which could subsequently turn into frustration and anger. In subsequent session the learner could then arrive with a negative mindset and not even attempt to move on – this could also impact on their learning and development in other areas of life.

If a learner shows positive behaviour it can not only have a beneficial impact on themselves, but also on the whole group. This would be observable through fantastic teamwork skills where there is collaboration and cooperation between learners. It could also be observed in the way they were learning from each other, for example peer learning where one child is assisting another with the correct way to tie a particular knot. These are examples of the learners building a cohesive group together and supporting each other to learn more. Sharing discoveries and skills provides mutual support and self-worth and builds stronger teams and friendships. It allows learners to develop new friendships and also to see people differently which can consequently positively impact across their whole school and social life.

In contrast, if a learner demonstrated negative behaviour it could have a detrimental impact on the whole group. Negative behaviour, even by just one learner, can completely upset the dynamics of the group, the flow of activities and the trust of the group. If they begin to dominate then they can prevent others from learning and developing, by distracting others, unnerving others and taking the group leader’s time from the rest of the group. Although during a couple of my pilot sessions I had one such learner and surprisingly the remainder of the group carried on with their exploring and activities and appeared to ignore this particular learner.

It is crucial that we use emotional intelligence and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to provide for all learners to get the most out of each session and therefore diminish any negative behaviour.

Encouraging positive behaviours

Being a teacher I use a range of strategies of encouraging appropriate behaviour for in the classroom but I had to rethink slightly in order to transfer these to Forest School. In order to evaluate I will look at both behaviour management and how to encourage Forest School behaviour.

A massive part of Forest School is allowing and ensuring it is pupil led. This demonstrates my trust in the learners and engages them, because it is what they want to do. This then creates two-way respect which should encourage positive behaviour. This is built on trust and relies on the learners appreciating that they are being trusted too so I personally believe this will be more effective the older the learner due to this.

As a practitioner I ensure that I model behaviour that is appropriate to Forest School. This could be through the way I walk through the woods to respect it, to the way I include all ideas. This is behaviour I would always use in the classroom, or indeed life, but it is not enough alone when thinking about all behaviour not just positive behaviour. During one of my Forest School sessions, I presume I had not explained clearly enough because the learners were looking a little lost. At this point I had a go at making something myself and experimented with different things and it was almost as if I was giving permission to explore as within 2-3 minutes lots of the group had followed suit, so I guess modelling behaviour did work in this instance.

Another appropriate behaviour for Forest School is that of independence, which is embedded in all our learning at school through Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills and so something the learning I am working with are used to. I have encourage this through providing very loose guidelines as to what we are doing to enable them to be creative, think about who they would like to work with, pick themselves up when something does not go quite to plan. Initially the group I worked with struggled with this almost free rein but through repetition and opportunities for them to share, reflect and feedback on their learning they soon got into the mindset that they were free to explore and there wasn’t a right or wrong. Although, at the time of writing I have not used any tools with the learners where obviously they will have to follow instructions for correct use rather than wield them in whatever way they choose!

By sharing and agreeing mutual guidelines for behaviour with the learners it allows everyone to feel secure about expectations. It allows for: mutual agreement, rather than being told; being upfront, so no surprises; sharing the rationale for the agreed behaviour and handing over ownership to the learners. Again this is something that can be done at different levels for learners – working in LKS2 meant that the children were mature enough to understand why the guidelines were needed. This approach may not be as effective with EYFS or learners with SEND.

Rewarding positive behaviour and attitude towards Forest School is an option to get learners to repeat this positive behaviour. This can be down through leading the line out at the end of a session; carrying the happy sack or helping with the roly-poly water carrier. This is useful but also very difficult for it to be consistently fair as in the forest you cannot see each learner and the progress they are making all the time.

By creating opportunities for learners to talk about what they are doing or issues and feelings through reflection time or check-in / check-out time is a good opportunity to reinforce expected behaviour in an open forum. By having this built into Forest School sessions it takes the pressure off it being about a particular incident that has happened.

Through ensuring that tasks are ‘small and achievable’ which do not set learners up to fail but still challenge them, learners can build their confidence by having small successes and enable them to want to participate and develop their own self-belief that they can do it. This is a useful strategy but learners can often put pressure on themselves and either overcomplicates tasks or worry about taking risks and not try, in case it is not perfect.