Day 88 - Wildplay

I did a day of Wildplay today, covering my pregnant boss who is now struggling with the demands of a day in the woods whilst carrying extra weight!  It was one of the best Wildplay days I've ever done. By "Wildplay" in this post I refer to the particular Wildplay event we run where parents leave children with us for a day of playing outdoors.

These days are child led and the children always love den building and fires the most and are generally happy spending the day entertaining themselves in the woods, though we do make all sorts of activity suggestions and let them tell us their ideas too so the days can be quite varied.

Today, we had a lovely group of 4 children who had a great day of den building and really enjoyed whittling (with potato peelers). There was a lot of imaginative play too today which was nice, and I've had two helicopter rides and been involved in a war ;)

One boy enjoyed whittling sticks so much he spent quite some time 'peeling'  a whole log for us all to sit on at the camp fire later on.  The other two boys mostly whittled swords and guns whilst the girl was quite happy building her own den.

It was a really lovely day of outdoor fun! The boys like to do a bit of mud face painting but today they tried squashed blackberry face paint and loved it!

blackberry face painting.. we collected many more but whole berries were smeared across faces!!

R loved whittling. This was his first time at Wildplay but he had a good day so I hope we'll see him again another time.

The den built by the girl, she was inside giving it a test run.

Belts of weapons! Various swords and guns at the ready.

We struggled to find many dry sticks or kindling but the shavings pile from R's peeled log was plenty to get a fire going with a firesteel and we just managed to keep it going with a few collected twigs for about 15 minutes for some marshmallows!

We only had mini marshmallows but they were still ok for toasting. I can never join in with the marshmallow fun, being vegetarian. I'm sure I could get veggie ones somewhere, but I haven't found them yet! The children whittle their own sticks to toast them on.

The boys den, not actually a den but a helicopter!  We even had proper safety briefings about seatbelts, exits, not smoking and emergency procedures before taking off.

We (by which I mean just the two adults!) made clay mushrooms!

Before we packed away for the day, we had to check to see how waterproof the shelters were! The boys just wanted to get a bit wet really!

I love Wildplay days like this, when the children all play nicely together and have lots of fun :)