Teaching and Learning
How to Make a Success of Forest School
Start Forest School in your own grounds, with donated kit, a clear session routine and ideas from a team who've done it.
- 43 minutes
- Recorded webinar
- 0.5 CPD hours
- Certificate
Members
14 days free, then £70 a year or £7 a month.
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What you'll learn
- Explain how Forest School differs from other outdoor learning
- Run a session with a clear routine, from check-in to reflection
- Build a Forest School area from donated and found materials
- Use rules and a recall game to keep children safe while they take risks
- Plan simple activities like leaf bashing, pine cone feeders and den building
About this course
Forest School can look as if it needs woodland, a big budget and a team of specialists. One primary school started with an overgrown patch of 17 trees and a pile of donated logs. There was an old roadside bath too, and a higher level teaching assistant who'd just qualified.
You'll get a session routine you can copy: a weather check-in round the fire circle, the rules every time, a game, free play in the mud kitchen and hammocks, then hot chocolate and the best bits of the day. Add simple activities like leaf bashing, pine cone feeders and den building and you've got an afternoon that works week after week. Expect some resistance at first. One Year 6 group thought the mud kitchen was beneath them.
Over the same few years the school's exclusions fell sharply, which they put down to Forest School alongside their other nurture work.
- For early career teachers, governors and 5 other roles. Primary, secondary and special.
Recording
- 44 min
Webinar Playback