These imaginative and engaging workshops are designed to incorporate the indoor and outdoor classrooms of your school. They can be easily adapted to meet the needs of the children in your class and the vagaries of the weather. From experience, they work equally well with one class all day, or different classes throughout the day, allowing some or all of the children in your school the opportunity to participate.

Creating a sense of place in your school grounds

It is a well established fact that children with a sound sense of place are more secure and confident. This programme allows children to become more familiar with their immediate environment and appreciative of its resources and qualities. The experience includes a variety of experiential activities covering art, literacy, history, geography and citizenship, and enables children to explore their school environment from a number of different perspectives through qualitative fieldwork. Through the programme, they will develop numerous geographical, thinking and empathic skills as they take part in sensory trails, nature’s pallet, sound maps, steering cards and smelly cocktails. The stimulating activities will provide inspiration for writing some meaningful and sensitive poetry expressing their newly found feelings about their local environment.

Woodland Crafts & Forest skills

A highly creative programme, this is an opportunity for children to truly experience the outdoor classroom, allowing them to learn through experimentation and taking greater responsibility for their own actions. The day will help them to develop their self esteem and build confidence in their own abilities. Activities in this programme include whittling sticks, making beads and pencils, creating dream catchers, making natural tie dye, sampling nature’s tea and listening to stories. There is even the possibility of cooking lunch over a fire lit with spark from a natural flint ? Always an entrancing and unforgettable moment. This has always proved to be a very special and unique day.

Natures art

Children can discover the vast range of possibilities for interpreting the natural world in creative art form. They can discover and explore a wonderfully diverse and exciting new world on their doorstep through organic sculpture, nature?s pallet, collages, dream catchers, hanging mobiles, earth tiles, making paint and dyes from natural products and drawing with different sticks and grasses.

Working with willow

Working in this pliable and versatile medium, children can create a living willow bower and then play in their own dome or tunnel maze. Other wonderful creations that they can make from willow include dragon flies, fish and crafted hanging baskets to decorate and brighten up the school grounds. This is also an opportunity for parents to get involved as they enjoy trying out and developing this new and unusual skill while interacting with their children.

Creative storytelling and story making

After meeting the woodland wonderer story teller and listening to the magical tales of the baga waga witch, children will be become the keepers of a magical story bag which will inspire them to come up with their own original and fantastical story or fairytale, developing their literacy and performance skills as well as deepening their awareness and appreciation of the mystery and wonder of our environment.

Together we stand, divided we fall

As the title suggests, this programme is all about teamwork, co-operation and collaboration. This is the perfect opportunity for classes and year groups to develop their identity and co-operative skills and for the children to build their individual confidence, core components of citizenship. The day is full of fun the range of challenges is designed to allow children to discover positive things about themselves that they never believed. It is a day in which their communication with and trust of each other will be tested to the full and invariably they will become closer and more in tune with one another.

Maps, mapping and ICT

This session focuses on how to bring maps alive and develop a wide range of map skills in a variety of real and stimulating contexts. These very practical and hands on activities are very transferable and with can be easily adapted for use back in the classroom and school grounds, providing a surprising amount of awe and wonder to the everyday environment. This imaginative and highly participatory workshop includes orienteering, map lines, map making, story maps, and deep maps.

Real rivers in the classroom!

Using a large interactive model of a drainage basin, children will have the opportunity to:

* Map current physical features and predict changes to the drainage basin when the river flows
* Choose the most suitable location to build their house
* Observe many thousands of years of river processes in just minutes – erosion, transportation and deposition
* Discuss the implications of flooding and come up with some solutions for minimising the risks
* Develop geographical vocobulary
* Enhance their fieldwork skills as they measure the width, depth and speed of the river

This proves to be an absorbing and effective way to teach children all about the concepts of rives at whatever stage, in a safe but still extremely exciting way.

The global dimension-Distant places

Learning about distant places is made far more meaningful when the children can use all their senses to discover and explore new and also familiar things. Using a box of authentic artefacts children gain an insight into the lives of children in India and travel in their minds and through their senses to the great sub-continent.

Children will compare the contents of a child’s lunch and school bag with their own, investigate photos, listen to music, play games, smell spices and enjoy practical hands on activities. At the end of the programme, children will have a much greater and deeper understanding and of not just the differences between our lives but also the similarities, allowing them to value people and places around the world with greater empathy and a passion to find out more.

Fieldwork. Own Locality past, present, future

Our own locality is one of the greatest resources that we have for effective and meaningful fieldwork. This workshop imaginatively explores a host of different ways of investigating the character of the local area through inspiring, field based activities.

Children will be able to develop their enquiry based skills as they investigate human and physical features, environmental issues, relationships between the locality and the wider world, the implications of change and land use patterns and processes.