Over the past 3 weeks the main focus in the Burrow has been fire lighting, looking at all our different components of fire and what we need to build this up. I believe that the children understand the true meaning of a fire and I hope at home you can see this in your children too!
This week we were based in the cabin, this luckily got us out of all the wind and rain we’ve experienced this week!
Once we had spoken about our rules I showed the children a flat piece of wood and allowed them to tell me what they could see. I placed down a fire steel, cotton wool, gloves, sticks and a sheath knife. Not all the children knew what everything was but in the session we were able to identify what we had. I then produced the sheath knife we will be using and went through the knife talk. This involves; my knife is safe with the cover on, I don’t want to hurt my friends so I won’t be waving my knife around like this or leaving it on the floor, the blade is very sharp so I don’t want to touch this, when I’m not using my knife I put the case back on. At all times I was there with the children 1:1 whilst talking to them about our knives. After this I demonstrated to the children what we will be doing and linking this into our previous week of lighting fires.
When the children came up they knelt down without me prompting them and placed their glove on their hand. I then took the case off and handed them the knife; allowing them to have a feel of this and get to know it a little bit more. I then held onto the knife and showed them the pushing action we need to do and then slowly allowing them to do all the pushing. Most of the children could do this themselves and I was really impressed at what they could do!
After the child had used the knife we got our fire bits ready, fluffing our cotton wool and grabbing the fire steel. The children lit the fire and I placed their wood shavings on top. During this we spoke about the colour changes, material difference and what is happening to our shavings. When the fire is burning we often hear more speech coming from the children, this often involves what colours we can see and when the flames go out.
The session soon drew to an end and the children had free flow around the paddock. When we arrived back in nursery we spoke about what we did on forest school and what we enjoyed. The children were often eager to tell their parent or family member, one parent responded with “I better hide the knives as well as cotton wool then”.
What a brilliant week we’ve had and next week we will be focusing more on our skills and safety with the sheath knife.
Thanks for reading,
Lauren