Below you can fine links to five of our favourite sun activities to help you celebrate the Summer Solstice. Wet Felt a Sun Make Sun Tea Light a Fire with the Sun Natural Prints on Sun Paper Sun Weaving ..read more

Preserve leaves and make wilds art Don’t you wish those beautiful autumn leaves could last forever?  We love to preserve them by carefully dipping them in bees wax that has been melted on the campfire.  The wax quickly dries and the finished leaves can be used to create all sorts of things. You can buy bees wax in blocks or as granules online or in hardware shops. This is then melted in an old pan over a fire or on a hob. When the wax has melted completely the leaves can be dipped in. The leaves should then be held over the pan until the excess wax has dripped off and then laid flat ..read more

We love building dens in the woods, but if time or resources are against you then mini-shelters make a great alternative. You could make a mouse from an acorn or a hedgehog from some clay and foraged materials. You could take a much loved teddy bear with you and build them a house. This is a great chance to great creative and indulge in some imaginative play in nature. When your house has been built you will need to think about the garden. What will you use for furniture and what will your inhabitants eat? An acorn cup makes a great bowl and a small stick the perfect spoon. Before you know it ..read more

There is something irresistible about conkers. When you find a Horse Chestnut Tree in the Autumn it is almost impossible not to pick up the shiny round treasures and put them in your pocket. Although playing conkers has long gone out of fashion it is still a lot of fun. Many of the adult at our sessions remember soaking conkers in vinegar, lightly roasting them or putting them in the freezers in an effort to make them harder and increase the chance of winning. Although the children are usually confused at first they are generally intrigued enough to have a game! If you are not the competitiv ..read more

Only three British mammals genuinely hibernate.  These are the Dormouse, hedgehog and the bat.  Other animals such as squirrels and badgers take it easy and spend much of the winter in their drays and sets.  However, they do venture out to feed and their bodies don’t go into full shut down unlike those that hibernate. We can celebrate these animals with activities while we ponder what it would be like to hibernate and if we would do it ourselves given the choice. You can find a few ideas below. Make Hedgehog Bread Make a Dormouse from an acorn and build it a cosy nest or mini ..read more

Love them or hate them no one can deny that they are a talking point and with 650 species in the UK they are hard to avoid!  Why is it they seem to be out in force in the Autumn?  The answer is mating season!  The female spider will stay in her summer web and can often be seen in the middle while the web is glistening with raindrops or dew caught by the Autumn sunshine.  The males can be found scuttling about in search of a partner.  I will save you from all the gory details of a Spider’s mating habits.  All I will say is the male usually stays in the female’s web ..read more

Go on a Hazelnut hunt There is something rather magical about the Hazel tree.  Red flowers give way to yellow catkins and finally nuts.  How wonderful to find a source of protein literally growing on trees.  If you look around the base of this twiggy tree you are liable to find lots of discarded nutshells.  With a bit of detective work and a magnifying glass we can come to some conclusions about which woodland creatures have eaten the nut!  Chief suspects include Squirrels, Wood Mice, Nuthatches and Hazel Weevils.  If we are really lucky we might find a nut that h ..read more

Discover some fabulous Fungi It’s so exciting a take a walk in the woods on a rainy day and discover the strange mushrooms that seem to have been woken by the rain.  Children seem to revel in the fact that some are poisonous and once safety rules have been establish there is so much to discover for all ages.  Very young children can recognise different colours and shapes of the fungus they find.  They can imagine fairies sitting on top of a Fly Agaric or dancing around the Fairy Ring Champignon.  We like to give our Autumn events a magical twist and the fungi provides the p ..read more

Crab apple trees are common in woodland and several of the woods we use for our sessions have prominent crab apple trees. They stand out in the Spring when they are covered in blossom and they are easy to identify this time of year, by the sea of round yellow apples on the ground. These apples get their name because they are sour - like a crabby person! They might seem of little value, but every cultivated variety of apple descended from the crab apple. We use them in the mud kitchen, we roll them down drainpipes, race them against pine cones and conkers, and we use them as stamps to make app ..read more

Below you can find all our Forest School inspired Easter activities, previously published on our blog, in one place. Sugared Primroses Easter Wreath Compass Easter Egg Hunt Wild Easter Afternoon Tea Easter Tree Egg Dying Birds Nest Challenge Cress Heads Egg Blowing and Wild Omlettes ..read more