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Mellor Community Primary School

Forest School Champions

Meet the Team

We are an enthusiastic and dedicated group of Year 5 and 6 pupils:

  • We show kindness, co-operation and great communication skills
  • We love learning outdoors, whatever the weather
  • We’re keen to develop our skills in using a range of outdoor tools and equipment
  • We are developing our knowledge and skills in fire-lighting and maintaining a fire for cooking on, ensuring we follow safety guidelines
  • We are developing our knot-tying and den-building skills
  • We continue to learn more about plants and animals so that we can share our knowledge with others
  • We assist Beccy in maintaining our school pond and vegetable garden

Forest School Champions 23-24 (ID 2292)

 

Report to Governors

2024/25

We are a dedicated and enthusiastic new team of Forest School Champions. We applied for our new roles at the end of August and have been committed to attending the Forest School Champion after-school club every Friday. So far, we have focused on three main areas:

  • 1) We have been trained to use a pond-dipping technique that keeps us safe and protects the pond creatures and their habitat. We have demonstrated our knowledge and skills to Beccy and are now able to support other pupils in pond-dipping activities.
  • 2) We have been taught how to ignite a fire using flint and steel, lighting the tinder and adding kindling. Our next step is to construct a bigger fire that is capable of cooking food, for example marshmallows and popcorn. Our knowledge now includes ‘The Fire Triangle’ and keeping safe within the Fire Circle. In the future, we can help Beccy by supporting younger children with fire-lighting.
  • 3) We have been learning how to use some sharp tools safely, including loppers and secateurs. These have been used to help Beccy maintain the Forest School area. Gardening and litter-picking are a weekly task too.

When the wintry weather or dark evenings make it difficult to work outside after school, we are going to work inside on tool skills, craft ideas and learning a variety of knots.  We will need to select and buy foods for cooking on the campfire and will look for the best deals with Beccy. We may also need to purchase some cutting tools, for example potato peelers and a saw.

Summer Term 23/24

 Following the completion of Year 6 SATs, we are enjoying supporting our Year 5 and 6 classes in fire-lighting and outdoor cooking. This involves explaining all the safety rules, including the fire circle entrance and exit points and the safety equipment that we must always have to hand when lighting a camp fire. For outdoor cooking, we chose marshmallows (halal) and teacakes (vegetarian/vegan option) for toasting and demonstrated to our classmates how to light the fire with steels and natural tinder, feed the fire with a variety of natural kindling followed by dry wood, allow the fire to burn down to hot embers and toast food safely wearing fire gloves. We would like to have vegetarian marshmallows for future classes and have found out that Asda sells these. They are more expensive but will be a lovely treat.

We continue to support others when pond-dipping, demonstrating the method to keep themselves and our pond-life safe. Our knowledge is growing and we are able to identify pond creatures and share facts about them.

Spring Term 23/24

In November we continued our training with loppers and secateurs, pruning bushes and shrubs  in the Forest School area. In December we used our cutting skills to prepare our gathered trimmings and stems for a Christmas craft activity: Twiggy Stars. We gave Beccy ideas about how we could make this task easier for Year 5 pupils to create the stars: longer flexible twigs and brighter twine for lashing the twigs together to make the stars look more festive. The next Tuesday, the weather was very windy and wet so we did the Christmas craft activity with each Year 5 class in their classrooms. We helped show them clove-hitch knots and how to lash the twigs together. It was a shame we couldn’t do this outside but Year 5 made some really good twiggy stars.

At the beginning of January, we looked with Beccy at a catalogue and chose some orange high-vis jackets. We decided to label them on the back: Forest School Champion. This will make it much easier for the other children to spot us and know that we are there to help them. They arrived in time for our next training day on 16.01.24 so we wore them to practise lighting tinder with fire -steels. Beccy explained the fire safety rules when working in the fire circle, and we managed to light a 5-minute fire using natural tinder and kindling. We talked about the types of food we would like to cook on our fire in the future and decided on a choice of marshmallows, vegan and non-vegan.

We wore our new jackets when we supported our Year 6 classes the next week. Unfortunately, it was too wet and windy to do fire-lighting but we still helped support the gardening task, bird-watching and making bird feeders. Two of us did support Year 4 on 30.01.24 with using fire-steels and Beccy said we were really helpful. We’re looking forward to more fire-lighting and then outdoor cooking in the Summer term.

Autumn Term 23/24 

At the beginning of Year 6, we each wrote an application to become a Forest School Champion and Beccy invited the applicants to an outdoor session on 5.09.23 to demonstrate our interest in Forest School activities. Beccy selected us because of good communication skills as well as our curiosity and helpfulness.

Our first training day (12.09.23) was very rainy but we wore the right clothing and enjoyed our session. We were taught to instruct others when pond-dipping by demonstrating how to use the net and how to empty your catch safely causing no harm to the pond-life. We practised tying a clove hitch knot. We also began our sharp-tool training by learning Tool Talks for using secateurs and loppers. We took home laminated tool-talk and clove-hitch/square lashing sheets to practise these for our next session.

Following our first training session, we assisted Beccy with classes from Years 4, 5 and 6, supporting pupils in pond-dipping and gardening during their Forest School sessions. In our most recent training session on 7.11.23, we continued our work with sharp tools and demonstrated the knot-tying we have been learning. In our next training session in December, we will continue our sharp tools training and practise our fire-lighting skills, ready to help support other Mellor pupils in the Spring term.

Akshara, Arya, Ramsha, Ronnell, Samah, Sahib, Jiana & Roxen   

 

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