The Forest Schools are held in woodland on a range of farms and local estates and the project is co-ordinated by Oxfordshire LEA and Northmoor Trust, a charitable trust.
Teachers appreciate that we focus on the development of the whole child, build children's confidence and self-esteem and can approach language and literacy in an informal way.
Because the emphasis is on child-led learning, our planning is limited and we spend more time evaluating the learning that has occurred at the end of the day. It is easier, then, to sum up a year than a session, which will always follow the children's interests.
At the beginning of the year, many of the children are very tentative about being in the woods, so we spend this time building up their confidence and independence through games such as hide-and-seek and rope trails.
Once their confidence grows, they can follow their interests. Today the group I was with made rope swings and had great fun pulling each other on them. It is through experiences like these that they can develop their understanding of often complex concepts, in this case forces and motion.
Towards the end of the year, we set the children some tougher challenges such as using penknives and cooking on an open fire, which inevitably are more adult-led, but provide great learning experiences.
