Hello and welcome to my first Forest School blog! Recently Lou from the Warren has been planning and evaluating our sessions but the time has come for me to take over and see what our little burrowers can do.
In the Burrow we find that the children love to climb inside and are often reminded “we don’t climb on tables” or “come down please”, so I thought why don’t we take the children out and encourage them to climb in more challenging circumstances.
Our routine before getting active is to have some yummy snack to allow us to have lots of energy, we sit in the fort to have our snack and talk to the children about our forest school activity. Then it’s ready to jump and go explore all the climbing equipment that is available to us, whether it’s logs piled up, balancing along high platforms or going down the slippery slide the children always seem to amaze us!
When we are climbing we use speech that links in with our activity to get the children to think about what they are doing and what might happen, I had the following conversation with a Burrower who is nearly 3;
M: I want to climb there
Me: Ok, go on then
M: I can’t
Me: try first and then I will help you if you can’t
Amazingly Max climbed up the logs by himself, it’s all about giving the confidence and it is so easy as an adult to grab their hand and help them, but when you reflect and observe you understand that they learn to give things a go themselves. Whilst Max was climbing we were talking about what the logs felt like, he described them as ‘wet and slippery’. His foot slipped at one point and he responded ‘bit slippy Lauren’. Max managed to climb all the way to the top and I praised him really well and gave him the reassurance he needed to achieve his goal!
I then threw a spanner into the mix by saying “are you going to jump off” which he replied “don’t be silly Lauren it’s too high”.
In Free Rangers it’s all about allowing the child to risk take but safely, of course the whole time Max was climbing I was there to catch him if he fell and seeing the look on his face when he reached the top was worth waiting for 3 minutes longer than if I had helped him.
Thanks for reading and I hope this will give you the encouragement you need to sometimes step back and see the full potential of your 2 year old J
Lauren