U is for Up and Up and Up

This post is written in celebration of the 20 000 Teach Pre-school Facebook followers. This is a testimony both to the interest of pre-school practitioners who visit the page and Deborah for her hard work in keeping the Facebook page and her Teach Pre-school blog up and running whilst working full time. Congratulations.

I chose the letter "U" because I believe that the only way is up! Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn give us the opportunity to share, enjoy and learn from each other.

Last week I was visiting an outdoor pre-school in Sweden and this little girl gave us all a lesson in how to climb a tree. How to climb up, and up and up! Here it is...

You call that climbing! Here let me show you...

First get onto the tree...

Then stretch up to a branch above your head...

Swing your legs up and over the branch...

And pull yourself up!

Get your feet up high and into the crouch position

The rest is easy...

I'm really getting high...

But don't worry! I'm fine!

I'm the King of the Castle up here!

In the I Ur och Skur pre-schools in Sweden, tree climbing is regarded as a normal play activity. The staff recognise and understand that children rarely put themselves in a situation where they feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

There are some super posts about tree climbing. Recently Squiggle Mum blogged about her child falling from a tree and Kindling has an excellent post about the issues around tree climbing. Enjoy and celebrate the art of going up, and up and up!

Outdoor Literacy: Introducing letters

When young children are learning to write it is tempting to give them a pencil and paper or tracing template. Before this happens, there are many multisensory activities which can help children recognise the letter, its sound and how to form it.

A useful outdoor starting point is to ask children to make the first letter in their name from natural materials of their choosing. Some may need a letter to copy but others will know this from memory.

At the Skogsmulle International training course, this activity was given to the participants on Day 2 and it gave me a lovely opportunity to illustrate this method, which I've used with classes in the past. I think it is a nice activity for starting back at school after the summer and to help children acclimatise to learning outdoors using materials around them.

Here we are getting going...

Sara's name is made with stones as they start with the same letter as her name...

Lena had the same idea with leaves...

Pauline wanted to make her letter pretty!

I wanted my letter to lookout over the lake...

Trisha's letter is made from twigs, with additional greenery...

And Caroline found a twig that naturally curved to make her initial letter...

If you have other ideas or activities for introducing letters outside, please do share them. I've blogged before about writing outside and creating writing friendly outdoor spaces.

Skogsmulle - Learning for All the Senses

Over this weekend, a special event is happening here in Sweden just outside Stockholm. The first International Skogsmulle training course is taking place.

"Kollikok!" is Skogsmulle's call and is used to gather children!

15 participants from 8 different countries have come together to look at leading groups of children in nature. Whilst it may be described as "Swedish Forest School" I think it's important to note that it is about working with children in a variety of habitats. There just happens to be a lot of woodland in Sweden. It is also a different course to the UK OCN Forest School Leader qualifications.

And here we all are! England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Russia, Latvia, Canada and Trinidad & Tobago

It was Gösta Frohm, who came up with the idea which has grown into a hugely popular national activity. Over one quarter of the Swedish population having attended Skogsmulle activities as young children. More information about the development of Skogsmulle and Gösta Frohm will be found in Outdoor Learning Past and Present by Rosaleen Joyce when it is published in 2012.

Introducing ourselves to each other via a Skogsmulle puppet

In 1986, the first I Ur och Skur (In Rain or Shine) nursery opened and this led to a movement that has resulted in more than 190 nurseries and 20 primary schools that are based upon Skogsmulle pedagogy being established in Sweden. For more information about the I Ur och Skur schools, have a look at the Swedish Forest Schools reports which I wrote the last time I visited Sweden.

So this is history in the making. The trainer's manual has been translated into English and the days are full of activities. Watch this space!

Outdoor Art: Using Gathered Wool to Make Felt

Last year, I blogged about making felt seats from merino wool. Although this project worked a treat and I still have the seats and use them in my courses, I really wanted to do the whole thing from scratch with the wool gathering malarky and all that entailed. Many children rarely get the chance to gather a product from the wild and turn it into something useful or that has meaning to them. In these times, the need for children to make connections with the world around them is more important than ever. Doing a wool project is an opportunity not to be missed.

In May I went for a walk in the Pentland hills. Early summer is a good time to look for wool, as sheep begin to shed their coats.

If you look closely at the flecks in the foreground, you'll see that they are not cotton grass or another plant, but tufts of wool!

Thus gathering wool is fairly straightforward. The only thing to remember is that it seems to love getting attached to nettles, thistles and sheep droppings. Ow! Ouch! Er!

To my delight, a friend who lives on a farm has acquired a flock of soay sheep earlier this year. My felting dreams were realised at last! The white wool gathered above is unlikely to felt well owing to its long, coarse fibres. By contrast, soay wool is ideal. These sheep do not need shearing. Their wool is shed naturally. Soay sheep are a traditional Scottish heritage breed that originally came from St Kilda and have beautiful brown fleece in a dazzling array of shades...

Once the wool has been collected, it needs to be picked over. This means removing all the bits of grass, muck, twigs and other debris gathered. The soay wool on the left has not been picked over. The wool on the right looks much cleaner. It hasn't been washed - the wool comes in a variety of colours.

In the photo below you can see the different between the black-face sheep with the long white wool fibres compared to the more fluffy soay wool.

There is some debate as to whether the picked over wool should be washed before carding. This will remove the finer grains of dirt and lanolin, which is the wool fat that keeps the wool waterproof. As I wanted to make outdoor seats, which will be used in all weathers and get quite mucky, I decided to card the wool without washing it. 

Although I did this indoors, it's a messy job better suited to being outside. The scraps of wool fly everywhere and flecks of dirt drop out coating everything with fine dark dust!

I added some white wool to my felting experiment. On the right hand side is merino wool which is a commercially bought product. On the left is some beautiful curly blue-faced leicester wool that has been washed.

So after a lot of carding, layering, rolling and kneading (see this post for instructions), I finally had a felt mat that looked like this...

This is such a simple outdoor textile project for children and adults of all ages. At the moment, fleeces are very cheap and many farmers will freely donate the wool. This is one of many possible wool projects - please do share your own woolly ideas and activities.

Nets for Outdoor Play, Display and Learning

Nets are a forgotten resource that have tremendous value in education and play settings. Here's a few examples to show you why...

Firstly, remember the fun to be had, clambering under a cargo net as part of home-made assault courses...

The children at the school below adore the nets that are part of their Scrapstore Playpod. They make dens and homemade hammocks and traps with them in a wee woodland area...

Netting is essential for keeping birds away from fruit crops such as raspberries and blackcurrants. Below, the netting area is tall enough for children to walk into and use as a den as well... shelter and food together!

Camouflage nets are popular for making dens. However, if pulled the wrong way or if they snag on a branch, they do rip apart very quickly, so care is needed. Extra camouflage is possible if long grass, ferns or other plant material is woven into any sort of net.

Children love being able to peek out through all the holes. It's a good cover for a birdwatching hide, owing to the colour and visibility of the people inside. At the Cowgate Centre, it is used to provide a darker place. CD ROMs also hang down. Light objects can easily be attached to these and other nets. 

Nets can be used as a storage system. Here the fishing nets keep a pile of junk in one place!

At Inverallochy School, the P6 and 7 children made the fishing net below under guidance from a local fisherman and turned it into this beautiful outdoor display...

In the Czech Republic lots of schools used nets indoors to display work too. Below is work inspired by a series of weekly visits to local woods by a nursery class. As you can see, the paper is pegged to the net.

Below is a jute net that was used for display in a shell shop. I haggled with the shop keeper over a price and managed to buy it off him! The pegs below have miniature blackboards attached. I just feel these will work nicely for instructions and wee messages for children to read outside or in...

And in a little art shop in Fife, I spotted this net in a window. Again, indoors or out, interesting items can be added to nets by children. This could make a good memory net of a trip to the seaside or a visit elsewhere...

Nets come in all shapes, sizes, colours and contrasts. A worthwhile investment for learning, play or display! How do you use yours?

Woods for Learning: St Mungo Primary

At the end of last term I had the privilege of delivering an in-set day in Dumfries and Galloway that was hosted by St Mungo Primary School. I had been looking forward to the day, not least because half of the activities were undertaken in their local woodland.

It's such an unassuming looking wood from the roadside

This was not a Forest School set up. No member of staff have undertaken their Forest School training. Instead, the school had worked in partnership with two local rangers to develop the site and enable the whole school to visit on a monthly basis. The project has been so well done, I just had to blog about it! For me it is an excellent example of partnership working to facilitate and enable quality learning activities to happen.

I'm very fond of gates and stiles as entrances to sites. This one is very inviting!

The project began back in April 2010 when the head teacher, Ruth Anderson, wrote to the local estate asking to adopt a piece of forest. As the area had little commercial value, the owner was more than willing for this woodland area to be used by the school. It is entirely enclosed by a fence.

This sign greets you over the fence. The rangers made the letters but the children helped erect the sign.

A rather fetching trowel has been added to the welcome sign!

Jim Rae, a former biology teacher and volunteer with the Wildlife Trust at Lockerbie, was first involved with the school through its participation in the Big Bird Watch. He is one of the key rangers, who helped develop the site. A network of paths have been established by the children and rangers that allow children to roam around the whole site. The children decided to mark the larger paths with branches at either side which keeps visitors on the path rather than wandering off. The branches have all been gathered from the woods. This was specifically for an open afternoon where parents came to visit.

The whole site has been improved with very low cost measures. Below is one of many palettes that has been used as boardwalks throughout the site. These were free, donated by a local sawmill.

This is the main gathering area. Again the children, with the help of the rangers, have created enough seating for the whole school of 40 children.

Last Christmas there was a surprise for the children. The rangers had made family name tags for each bench. The children work in "family" groups comprising of children of mixed ages. These are named after the wildlife observed in the wood.

The spare wood has been left on site. I saw it used in several homemade dens and shelters tucked away in bushes.

The younger children tend to spend a morning on site. The older class stay for the whole day. When a school uses the same site on a regular basis, then consideration about how and where to let people go to the toilet has to happen. Here's the solution at St Mungo....

Firstly, the path that leads up to the toilet is a dead end. It's not part of any other path network. It's identifiable by the long fallen down tree trunk.

Although it's hard to see in the photo, there is a chicken wire fence that covers the entrance behind the base of the fallen down tree.

There is a natural dip in the ground which provides extra seclusion. A small pit has been dug and the children can use this area. The staff have found that the children tend not to need the toilet as much when  in the woods. Everyone goes to the toilet beforehand.

Throughout the site I stumbled upon interesting objects and situations. The sheep skull is near the benches for children to examine.

Several trees have been given labels so that children learn about the tree species that exist in the woods. 

I'm not sure what this section is used for, but it's crying out for a natural weaving project!

Corrugated iron sheets can be found in several places. This has been on site for many years. Animals shelter and burrow underneath, so the sheets are left alone and in situ

A couple of streams run through the site. This one was cleared by the older children for play purposes and  stream dipping!

It's very easy for schools to develop a dependency on ranger services or other organisations and professionals to provide lessons and activities outside. Yet unless schools are willing to pay for this, it is rarely a sustainable long term option.  The document Curriculum for Excellence through Outdoor Learning provides guidance on partnership working on p16. 

"Careful planning will help identify when and where staff in an establishment would benefit from working with partners or partner organisations to progress and increase outdoor learning experiences. There are many creative and stimulating ways to experience practical activities which may best be achieved by partners working in the school grounds or the local area

...partnerships can contribute to learners’ personalisation and choice by providing pathways and opportunities for children and young people to develop their learning and skills in new ways.

...specialist partners, who may be professionals or volunteers with expertise in areas such as school ground architecture, adventure activities or forest school practices, can offer invaluable technical knowledge and guidance. Volunteer partners can make the difference to outdoor learning experiences becoming viable."

It was evident that the skills and knowledge of the rangers have been used to enhance the project. Yet the staff plan and organise the learning activities, and have sessions on-site without ranger support. 

The poster below sums up the value of the project... "Once a season, the Lockerbie Wildlife Trust and the DGC Annandale and Eskdale Rangers take the school to learn about the great outdoors. From dandelion wishes to frog spawn, and bird boxes to bridge building, the children learn in an area they can call their own."

This past year, the Forestry Commission Scotland asked me to write a series of case studies looking at woods for learning projects taking place around Scotland. These are now available on the Education Scotland website. Read, enjoy and be inspired to take your children to the woods this year...