Year 2 Forest School; Term Autumn 1

Forest School - Autumn Term 1 2013/2014

Year 2 – Mr Cutler’s Class

Session 1

To get us thinking about our Comenius project to encourage wildlife into our outdoor areas we focused our sessions on a possible visitor to Forest School.  We talked about what hedgehogs eat and found out that beetles, caterpillars, earthworms, slugs and snails are their favourite food.  We then set about seeing how easy it was to find ‘hedgehog food’ in Forest School. 

We found it easy to find mini beasts and thought that there was plenty of food for hedgehogs in Forest School.

Session 2

We talked about where hedgehogs live, and the fact that they usually hibernate between November and mid March.  We found out that they usually nest in leaves, grass and various other plants.  They also nest in piles of logs or manmade hedgehog nests.  Our task was to build a home for a hedgehog.  We found that there were plenty of materials to work with in Forest School.

Another task for us was to fill our digging area with soil as the hole in it was getting quite deep.  We used buckets and spades to fill it from a pile of soil that had been delivered into Forest School.

Some of us preferred to stay on the pile of soil and set up a gymnasium for the worms!

Session 3

After finding out that there was plenty of food for hedgehogs and plenty of places for them to live we made models of hedgehogs using things we found in forest school.  For a lot of us that meant mixing soil and water and moulding them into hedgehog shapes.

 A lot of us really enjoyed the feel of the mud in our hands, and the feeling of

squelching in the mud in our welly boots!  We were all ready for a snack and a drink, after giving our hands a good wash!

After snack there was time to finish the hedgehog house and the sea dwelling dinosaur skeleton at the bottom of Forest School, it looked very realistic!