Please scroll down the page to see photos of our latest sessions.....
Year 2 (Meerkats)
Welcome to your Forest School activities page!
Here you will find details and photos of all our sessions in the Woodland and on the Animal Park. Please scroll down the page to see what we're getting up to each week!
Miss T gave a Health and Safety talk in class before our Forest School sessions started on Tuesday 16th and Friday 19th April. These sessions will run weekly until we break up for Summer.
The Forest School team are really enjoying working with you right the way through to July! We have 13 weeks of Forest School sessions to look forward to and we have lots of fabulous activities planned for you, Year 2
The planning for our weekly sessions can be found by clicking on the "Planning and Risk Assessments" tab, where you will also find a copy of the letter that has been sent home to parents, and our Risk Assessment. A list of the Groups can be found on Meerkats class page / News.
We will be visiting our wonderful animals each week and learning about their daily needs to make sure they stay healthy and safe. Over the coming weeks, we will visit the pond, the Community Garden and other areas of the woodland to study the trees, plants and wildlife that grow and thrive there, as well as watching how spring changes into full summer!
Please scroll down to see photos and write ups from our weekly sessions on the Animal Park and in the woodland!
Friday Group (Ladybirds) - Session 2 - 26th April
More jobs on the Animal Park and planting trees in our Community Garden
We had a chat with Friday Group about finding a name and they voted for "Ladybird Group". We will be painting our planters in a few weeks with the names of our groups.
The Animal Park is beginning to dry up really well now, at long last, and there isn't a lot of mud any more. Some of us managed to find enough to paint our faces though, as you'll see from the photos!
We fed everyone and some of us noticed that one of our goats, Scooby, was missing. Unfortunately we lost Scooby to Tetanus on Tuesday. After several visits from the vet over the weekend and lots of medication, the decision was made that he wasn't going to recover from this horrible infection and Miss T had to have him put to sleep. Scarsdale Farm Vets in Allestree, Derby have been an amazing support, both with Horace's illness, in March, and now with Scooby and we said a very sad farewell to Scooby Goat on Tuesday evening. The other four goats are a little bereft without their herd mate, but they are settling down into a new routine, and actually, they are being really well behaved!
Shaggy loves being brushed and stood very quiet and still while having his hair done, by three amazing hairdressers! He looked very smart and trotted round the Animal Park showing off!
The stream that flows from the duck ponds on the main Animal Park was very clogged up with sticks and wasn't flowing properly, so some of Ladybird Group cleared it and dug it a bit deeper, they did a really good job and there was a lot of really good team work and care with the digging tools.
One group emptied Horace's drinking tub, because the ducks had been swimming in it yet again and it was really smelly! We filled it up with lovely fresh water so Horace can have a good drink when he goes back in his paddock later. We collected 30 duck eggs and 26 hen eggs and we talked about the different sizes of eggs. The big brown ex-battery hens lay big brown eggs and the small fluffy hens lay smaller eggs and some of these smaller eggs are blue! We looked at the chicks and couldn't believe how much they'd grown since last week. We could easily have spent the whole session on the Animal Park this week, we were having such a good time!
We went up to the Community Garden because there were lots of things that needed planting out. There were some little trees and we worked out that they were Horse Chestnut seedlings that had grown from conkers two years ago. When we separated them to plant them into pots, there were some conkers that hadn't germinated in the bottom. We looked at the roots, the stem and the leaves and some of us knew that the stem would be called a trunk when the trees get bigger.
We also planted some seeds in the Ladybird Raised flower Bed! We planted Marigolds, Beetroot, Chard and some garlic. The garlic smelled really strong, and Miss T told us that is was a bulb of garlic that someone had thrown into the pig field. The pigs hadn't eaten it and it had started to grow! We talked about germination and what seeds need to enable them to grown healthy and strong. We will visit the Community Garden every week to see how everything is getting on.
We could also visit with our grown ups in the evenings and at weekends and we could show them what we've been doing!
A very busy session this week Ladybird Group, well done!
Tuesday Group (Rainbows) - Session 2 - 23rd April
Jobs on the Animal Park and planting in our Community Garden
We had a chat about naming our Forest School groups, and Tuesday Group decided they would like to be called "Rainbow Group".
We spent some time on the Animal Park and collected some eggs. There were a lot of eggs we couldn't collect this week as the Mamma Hens are incubating them. We held the eggs that they were sitting on and they were really warm. Some of these should hatch in about two weeks
Horace, our large pig decided to break one of our barrel chairs. He knocked it over and rolled it down the Animal Park, then kept pushing it with his nose until it broke. We found that a banana skin had fallen inside it and he could smell it, so he broke the chair to get to it! We needed to move what was left of the chair as there were lots of nails sticking out of it, so we worked really well as a team and managed to move it out of the way. Then we had to rake all the bits that were left to make sure there were no nails left on the ground.
We changed the water in Horace's water tub, because the ducks had been swimming in it again and it was really dirty and smelly. Miss T said this has to be done every day. Ducks are very messy!
We went into the woodland, and went up to the Community Garden, where Sam, Miss T's son, had prepared some planting activities for us. We talked about seeds, germination, and photosynthesis and what plants need to be healthy (soil, sunshine and water) and we also talked about the parts of a plant and what their purpose is. We are studying this in class at the moment and quite a few of us could remember what Mr Scott is teaching us. We planted some seeds that will grow into edible plants and we needed to prepare the soil in the planter first, by getting all the stones and sticks out of it; we also planted some bushes in fabric pots and then we looked at some mint plants, that smelt really lovely. We planted some kale plants and some strawberries. Hopefully in 12 weeks some of these plants will be ready to eat! We also found lots of worms and we learnt that these are really important to break down the soil and add extra nutrients to help the plants grow.
We found some Goose Grass (or sticky bud plant) and Sam told us that we can eat this too. Some of us tried a little bit, and we found that the texture is quite rough, but the flavour is lovely. Miss T told us that it is really important not to eat plants in the woodland unless a responsible adult, who knows what can and can't be eaten, is with us. If we eat the wrong plant, we could be really poorly. It's also important to only try a little bit of an edible plant, just to make sure we like it.
Lots of lovely learning this week Rainbows!
Have a look at our photos below.
Friday Group Session 1 - 19th April
Meeting our fabulous animals and visiting the pond
Friday FS group all brought their kit this week and got changed super quickly so we could get outside and onto our Animal Park. We had a quick chat about staying safe on the Animal Park and how we should behave around our animals. Everyone was super sensible and we fed our goats, chickens, ducks and Horace and Olive our pigs. There were lots of questions about why Olive doesn't come out of her paddock, (Olive comes out to play on the Animal Park in a morning, and Horace comes out with the ducks in an afternoon. If Horace and Olive are out at the same time, they get grumpy because they both want to eat all the left over food!) Some of us asked why some of the hens were sitting on their eggs. We had a chat about incubation and how we find out if the eggs have a chick inside or not. We will look at this more over the coming weeks. We collected about 25 hen and duck eggs and learned that we have to be super careful when putting the eggs in the bucket, otherwise they will break.
We cuddled the three chicks that hatched in the incubator in the Year 5 classroom just before Easter, which means they are just three weeks old. They are very soft and are just getting their wing feathers. One of the chicks even has feathers on his feet! Miss T explained that they are out in the coop during the day, but that they go into a brooder (which is a special box with a heat lamp) over night to keep them warm.
We refilled Horace's water tub with fresh water because the water was very dirty after the ducks had been swimming in it! We emptied the dirty water out and some of us dug a channel for the water to flow down, then we fetched clean water from the water tub in watering cans and filled it back up for Horace! We explored the Animal Park and found Horace's bedroom, the goat shed, three chicken coops and the duck coop. Some of the hens had jumped over the fence, but Miss T explained that they all come back when it's bed time.
We went down to the pond in the woodland and had a look at the tadpoles. They are very small at the moment, but as soon as the sun shines a bit more, and the weather gets a bit warmer, they will grow fast. We also saw some water shrimp and a few little leeches. Miss T told us how Year 6 have dug a new pond this year so we now have three lovely watery habitats in our woodland!
We had a lovely first Forest School session and the rain stayed away for us too!
Have a look at some photos below.
Tuesday Group Session 1 - 16th April
Meeting our wonderful animals and a trip to the pond.
We had beautiful, warm sunshine for our first Tuesday Group Forest School session. Everyone brought their kit and got changed really quickly and we went down to the Animal Park. We sat on the seating circle and the goats came to say hi, especially when they realised that we had some food! The chickens came over too and most of us were happy to let them peck food out of our hands.
Miss T showed us some chicks that hatched in the incubator in the Year 5 classroom just before Easter, which means they are nearly 3 weeks old now. We could see how their wing feathers are just starting to grow, but their heads were still covered in really soft fluff. This helps to keep them warm.
Miss T let Horace the pig and the ducks out of their enclosure and they all came running up to the seating circle. Horace is very big, but again, most of us were happy to give him a fuss. We know not to feed Horace from our hands, just in case he decides to nibble our fingers with his very large teeth!
We went and explored the Animal Park and soon found the river that flows out of the duck pond. We made bridges for the ducks and chickens to walk across, and we dug the river deeper in places so that it flowed better. We were super sensible with the digging tools and made sure everything was put back on the tool rack when we'd finished. Some of us groomed Shaggy the goat and some of us collected lots of duck and hen eggs. We collected 31 in total!
We went down to the pond in the woodland and we saw lots of tadpoles, fresh water shrimp and even a dragon fly larvae. There is lots of watercress growing in the pond and some of us tried eating some. It was very peppery and we needed a drink after eating it! Some of us wrote our names on the logs by dipping a stick into the water.
A super first session Tuesday Group, well done!
