Forest School Year 4

We are very excited to be starting our Forest School sessions. This year, we are being led by Miss Alcock and we know that she has lots of exciting things planned for us to do over the next few weeks which fit in around our Science, DT and Geography topics for this half term. We hope you enjoy seeing what we have been doing each week.

Week 1 –  This week we recapped the rules of forest school before playing our favourite games.  We spent some time refreshing our fire lighting skills and creating some tree decorations in preparation for Tree Dressing Day later on in the year.  We enjoyed trying out the swing and making things in the mud kitchen.  Here are our photos, we hope you enjoy looking at them.

 

Week 2 – We tried a new game this week “Hot Dog Tag”  We found it to be lots of fun and definitely one we want to play again.  This weeks theme was art and natural art,  as it was National Nature Art Week.  We looked at how natural materials can make such nice patterns before collecting our own materials and having a go at making mandala patterns.

Week 3 – This week we did a little experimenting.  Year 4’s science topic is states of matter and how things change from solid to liquid to gas.  So we decided to see what we would need to do to change chocolate buttons and a bottle of milk into hot chocolate.  We tried out a couple of different ideas before settling on warming the milk, so that it would be hot enough to change to solid buttons into liquid chocolate.  It was very thirsty work and we enjoyed the end result.

Week 4 – This week was all about taking a closer look at the world around us.  We were surprised at just how many different plants, tree and flowers we have in our school grounds and managed to tick off lots of boxes on our identification sheets.  We also had a go at making some autumn leaf flowers.

 

Week 5 – Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t great this week, so we took forest school inside.  Earlier in the week some of the children had found some mushrooms growing in the school grounds, we did some work on identifying them, before showing them to the rest of the class and giving them information about being safe and not picking or eating anything we find growing outside.  We started with an autumn treasure hunt, where we learnt lots of new facts.  We made autumn wreaths to take home, before finishing off with hot chocolate.