Forest School Jo

Apologies for the lack of blog this weekend just gone. I usually aim to do it on a Friday afternoon - and it sometimes spills into the weekend, but lately, time has been running away from me! With the last of Summer fading away any sunny day feels like it needs grabbing! My weekends are full of housework, laundry, errands, and chores, and when the sun shines the opportunity to ignore it all is very tempting. Of course, it doesn't actually go anywhere, but ignorance is bliss so I spent Sunday at a Flower Farm and have been playing catch up with the hoover and washing machine ever since! Meanwhile, although the new school year doesn't feel very new anymore, there are still a lot of changes and rearranges to accommodate. Forest School is always a work in progress, so developing sites and practice while getting to know new children means a lot of reworking. My two colleagues new to Forest School know the school well but don't know the classes in Forest School, this is a learnin...

Today dawned with scattered cloud and a breeze. The woods are always cooler and it's a relief to imagine 'working' without a borderline heatwave distracting everyone!  Everywhere on St. Mary's is in walking distance, but we were collected and chauffeured to site. For anyone unfamiliar with the islands off of Cornwall, the Scilly Isles have a Mediterranean temperate, are 5 habited islands, and scattered between are many more! The biggest is St. Mary's, where we are, and no where is as much as 3 miles from the sea, so it is the backdrop to almost everything. The site we will be using is next to  the beach so the setting is very photogenic! Here, there are various introduced trees, mostly mature, that are similar to Chartham. On school grounds we have Scots Pines, here there are huge Canadian Pines. There are invasive species to look out for as well as ones native but rare in the UK.  Bracken, gorse, and brambles are a given! After a chat with the Isle Of Scilly Wildli...