52 Weeks Wild #40

A collection of my wild moments from the past week...

This week began with the final Wildlings session at the Roaches. The Wild Child Officer (what a job title) was otherwise engaged this week, so I led the session which meant I didn't have the usual few free minutes I have between setting up and children arriving to take any photos. We had all the usual activities and this week made s'mores on the fire. We had 22 children attend which was great but a lot left early today as it was so windy!

 

There's a couple of weeks breaks before Wildlings starts off again in a different location, but I'm not working at the next ones. I'm looking forward to 'normal' Monday mornings again.

As I mentioned last week, I'm doing a bit of outdoor learning in school at the moment and have now set up nature table. This has got me outdoors a couple of times this week when I wouldn't have bothered otherwise as I've needed to collect a few things!

I spent a very happy half an hour in the woods on Tuesday evening, collecting a few things. I used the sticks in my little basket to make three spider webs to hang in nature table corner. I will need create do other bits like this through the seasons but the webs will do for now! I made one with plain old string and then remembered I had an old wildplay creation which involved a lot of silver wool, so I de-constructed that and used the wool for the other two webs and they looked pretty good!

 On Thursday evening I met up with colleagues from the education team at Staffordshire Wildlife Trust for our 'summer celebration'. A bit of a social gathering to celebrate surviving the summer (a very busy time for Wildplay!) and the number of children we are working with growing year on year. This summer, we've worked with 3000 children on the Children in Need funded wildplay events and then another 2000 (I think) on other SWT family events, which is pretty good.

We met in the woods for a campfire supper and cooked soup and bread and corn on the cob followed by baking apples over the fire and then dipping in sugar and cinnamon before baking them a bit more - very tasty! There was plenty of cake too, all washed down with tea and hot chocolate. We watched a couple of bats flying around before packing everything up and walking back to the car park just after dark. It was a lovely evening!

 On Friday I introduced the nature table at school. I left it looking quite nice and have asked the children to look out for things they might like to bring to the nature table over the weekend. I expect, when I arrive at school on Monday afternoon, the table will be trashed and there will just be a big pile of leaves stuffed on it, as I don't work with country children any more and they're not easy to engage with nature and don't get many opportunities for it in their home lives. As soon as I put the spider webs up, one child straight away asked "Can we whack it?"... we'll see how it goes anyway, perhaps I'm being too cynical and will be pleasantly surprised tomorrow. I could only take a photo on the school "camera" which is an ipod and is terrible, but this is what I've set up...

 The basket contains a load of conkers, some still in the cases, and the tray contains a selection of nice leaves, a load of beech masts and a couple of feathers. I've got an empty mirror mosaic plate there at the moment with the idea that I will showcase particularly interesting items and obviously plan to swap items and build up a more interesting and varied collection which changes with the seasons.  It's going to get me outdoors a little more too as I will have to be the main collector of interesting items for this one. I know that's not really how nature tables are supposed to work, but I work with children in a very deprived area, many with very difficult circumstances at home, so I'm expecting this to be more of a 'let me show what I found outside' thing than a child led, show and tell style table.  Either way, it's more nature connection than they were getting isn't it?!

I've not been outdoors really over the weekend sadly, life is too busy this autumn to be playing outside (I will make up for it next autumn!)... I did enjoy seeing kestrels today though on my way home from Waitrose this afternoon. I saw seven in total, all male.

Have you enjoyed any time outdoors over the last week?