Welcome to Forest School at Roman Way, 

Mrs Reid and Miss Morgan are our Forest School Practitioners and are committed to the Forest School ethos and supporting all the children at Roman Way to access all the opportunities available to them.

If you wish to understand more about Forest School, what opportunities your child will have as well as how best to support your child please refer to the attached handbook.

We will update the website regularly with timetable of session as well as what we have been up to during our time.

Autumn 1

KS1 - Exploring and relaxing in the environment, building swings, playing team games, expressing ourselves with art and creating bands using natural resources.

KS2 -  We worked towards gaining last few points for our Woodland Trust Gold Award - this included us identifying trees understanding their importance, working out the age of our woodland. Lastly designed a tree champion, an imaginary person or being that would protect the woodland. Once we had designed our champion we set to work to create them using tools and natural resources.

Autumn 2

KS1 - The rain started, which opened the opportunity for lots of mud play, mud kitchen, mud art.....MUD, MUD, MUD!!! Great fun had by all. We managed to fit in the use of tools to make Christmas decoration. We used a bow saw and a palm drill.

KS2- Building shelters and creating our own mini worlds - theme parks, vets, and shops, allowing us to trade items, resources and skills.  We expanded on our tool skills, using a bow saw, palm drills, whittling knives to make reindeers and Christmas puppets

Spring 1

KS1- Started the term by exploring the woodland area, discovering a variety of fungi, animal tracks and possible animal/insect homes.  KS1 have kick-started our road to achieving our Woodland Trust Platinum Award. We have spent the term learning about what lives in UK woodlands.  We categorised a number of animals then choose to focus on the Red Squirrel, Badger, and Tawny Owl. We learnt about where they would live, what they eat and physical adaptations that are key to their survival. 

KS2 - The theme this term was team work. Miss Morgan and Mrs Reid designed three different team games which pushed us to developed all areas of communication and working together. We spent time reflecting on skills, acknowledging our strengths and areas we could improve. After this the children had go and designing their own games and leading them for other to try.

Spring 2

KS1 We started our session looking for early signs of Spring, we used our senses to help us detect these signs, what could we hear, see and feel.  We enjoyed spending time in the garden, tidying, planting and discovering bugs and insects that were emerging from the woodwork with the new warmer weather.

Many of us discovered the joy and challenges of tree climbing, sharing a space with friends, different ways to move around the tree as well as seeing the world from a different perspective.

KS2 - We started our sessions noticing how much our wet, muddy, bare environment was quickly changing.

Many of us enjoyed time in the garden, turning the soil, weeding and seeing our saplings growing from the acorns we planted earlier in the year.

We spent a lot of our time in our den building area creating communities of different industries working out how to fend off competition from another cafe as well as working alongside other industries, building our cafe next to the local theme park meant both companies gained more forest school money.

It was a good opportunity to get tools out seeing many of the children making bows and arrows.

Summer 1

Our Forest School Focus this term for all year groups was Fires.

We started by looking at and understanding the fire triangle, our safety equipment and personal safety.

Year R/1 We just enjoying the awe and wonder of fires. We cooked toast, and then the children buttered this themselves, before sitting down and enjoying the warmth of the fire with friends and hot buttery toast in our bellies and around our faces.

Year 2/3 We focused on the building of fires, working as a team to build a fire from sticks, with larger, longer burning wood at the bottom and thinner quick lighting sticks towards the top.  We started to take ownership of our own cooking skills around the fires, looking at how we keep ourselves safe.

Year 4 : Can we start the fire? We looked at our technic when striking and our perseverance on a new and challenging skill. We were looking further into improving our cooking skills and spent time looking at the difference between cooking on the flame or embers.

Year 5 : We continued to develop our cooking skills, with the focus being on maintaining a fire. We had to decide whether we needed flames or embers depending on what we wanted to cook and how do we maintain the fire when it starts to die down. This required remembering our fire triangle and working out what was causing the fire die down.

Year 6: Can we do it all by ourselves!!!!