spring sunshine

The Wild Forest Day is closer than I'd thought! The Easter Break runs for much of April, so, to keep up the momentum, the Head and I decided to try to fit in the class visits and our much-anticipated day in the Forest before the end of March. We have planned the next class visit for this Thursday 19th and the Wild Forest Day for 27th March.

With this in mind, the Head teacher and I spent the glorious forenoon of Sunday (Mother's Day) morning out in the Forest, following the route I have been planning. She needs to consider the health and safety aspects, but was also keen to have an idea of what to expect, so she can prepare the class.

It was a beautiful crisp early spring morning, sun hazing through clearing mist, song thrush, chaffinches, coal tits, robins, goldcrests in full song, frogspawn fresh in the burns and ditches - a real sense of spring gathering force, despite the night's frost.

I had sketched a map with ideas for activities at various points that will use all the childrens' senses and heighten their awareness of what 'stories' the Forest has to tell. The route involves going off the track into wild bog woodland, across a burn, some pathfinding. I never feel completely relaxed unless I'm off a track myself, and am sure it helps to get out of one's 'human' identity. The 20 children will be split into 4 groups of 5 - each group will think up an animal name, a wild 'call sign', names for each child to do with the history or wildlife of the forest. We will be looking closely through hand lens and binoculars, using wildlife calls rather than words to communicate, telling stories and acting plays on 5000 year old chambered cairns, thinking about predator and prey in hunting games, tracking animals using tracks and scats, playing tactile games with eyes closed, choosing and sitting with a special tree, learning and listening to bird songs, watching out for red kite, osprey, buzzard and red squirrel, making dens, nests and nature sculptures, passing messages from ancient peoples between the three chambered cairns.... 

Every thought, impression, feeling, word and experience that the Forest gives us over the course of the day is part of its 'story' - to be noted down in pictures or words, in small found objects, to be 'gathered' - and to help with a final collaborative creation.

And every creative thing the children do, whatever inspires them, both in the Forest and back in the classroom, is part of their 'gift' of imagination back to the Forest. 

The Head teacher was happy with these ideas, and with letting the children take things where they wanted to on the day - they will have plenty of their own inspiration.

Of course, it is the creative imagination that counts. As Jose Ortega Y Gasset wrote, 'To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand'. Another writer, W. MacNeile Dixon, believed that, 'To understand any living thing you must, so to say, creep within, and feel the beating of its heart'

We are hoping for good weather for 27th - and I hope that the Forest will give us the inspiration we need to begin to understand something of what it all might be out there beyond the human world...