"Forest School Sessions with our local Sure start partners."

During a local Early Years forum meeting, Louise, a member of the Surestart team, talked about how they were offering a series of free Forest School sessions to local groups, schools and charities (playgroups etc).  Having a class who loved the outdoors I approached Louise to see if this could be offered to our Foundation 2 class in a small village school.

After several emails with Louise we organised a meeting to put into place our 4 sessions, she wanted to see our outdoor area and plan around the space we had available. She produced packs for the parents of the children to sign for risk assessment etc and within a few weeks we were set up and ready to go. The process from my point of view was extremely efficient. 

The session were run by Louise, Sapphire  and Kelly - all who  demonstrated a passion for working with young children and in particular the outdoors. They weren't phased by the limit outdoor space (and lack of a forest!) planning and delivering activities that all our children thoroughly enjoyed. Especially our children who have significant needs, being driven by the children's interests and working with staff members from our school to insure the children took away a love of the outdoors. The team provided all the resources and I am sure we hit every aspect of the EYFS over the 4 weeks. We did an array of activities from natural paintbrushes, whittling and muddy footprint making!

After two sessions where we were hit with all four seasons of the British weather we knew as a school it was something we wanted to carry on when the Surestart team left us. The children were truly engaged and produced some fantastic work during and after the sessions.  

We are lucky enough to have the Surestart team running fortnightly session in our school hall so the children were eager to show Kelly and Louise our display of their  work, photographs and new ideas for forest school sessions.

We absolutely loved our sessions and we cannot thank Louise and the team for introducing us to such a fantastic way to engage all children, regardless of needs. Thanks to their support and ideas we will now be continuing our Forest School sessions and hope that others can benefit from the opportunity to have Forest school sessions in their setting.