All About Forest School

All children in years 1 to 5 at Long Crendon School attend regular Forest School sessions with Mrs Simons, our Level 3 trained Forest School Leader. Half class Forest School sessions continue throughout the year, each child gets to attend a session every other week.

Sessions combine Forest School practices with child led outdoor learning, aiming to support the curriculum, and give all children a chance to explore and embed different concepts and classroom learning in a practical way. 

Forest School sessions give children the chance to get closer to nature and consolidate classroom learning by drawing on their cross-curricular knowledge to solve practical problems and complete creative tasks. The boost to self esteem, self-confidence and independent problem solving that children gain from learning in this way is well documented and has been used successfully to support holistic learning in Primary Schools across the UK for many years.

The Forest School site at Long Crendon School is slowly turning into an oasis for our native wildlife. All children, staff, adult volunteers and Mrs Simons have worked hard to turn the children’s site development ideas into reality. We have planted, built, installed, and created a raft of different features that enrich our Forest School experience. We now have different habitat zones that are designed to attract a wide variety of wildlife to our site, we have climbing logs, a large digging pit, a sensory planting area, a base camp with a permanent fire pit, we have planted over 400 saplings (kindly donated by the Woodland Trust) and have created a mini orchard.

These are a few of the things children have had a go at during Forest School Sessions:

Cooking on the fire pit, ‘Long Crendon’s Got Talent’ shows, den building, nature spotting, making bird feeders, planting bulbs and tree seeds, creating sculptures, using tools to make useful things, setting up experiments, identifying winter twigs, making bird hides, mapping out a life size Celtic round house and a Roman villa, building a reptile habitat, designing a bat box, playing team games, tree climbing, planting and looking after allotment beds, orienteering, and getting muddy!

Enjoying the outdoors and want some ideas for things to do at the weekend or during the holidays?