11 Cool Ideas for Educational Play in the Woods

Forest School for toddlers has a huge range of benefits, including improved health and fitness, concentration, co-operation, emotional wellbeing and independence. They also learn important skills like problem-solving, assessing risk and communication. Here are eleven forest school activities that you can easily set up, with next to no expense or equipment required.

1. Build a bug hotel - Encourage insects to your garden by building them their very own residence using planks of wood or old pallets or crates piled up with bricks between the layers. Your child can fill the gaps between the layers with things to make their visitors at home. Use items such as cardboard tubes, shredded paper, feathers and pebbles. Keep checking every day to see who has moved in.
   
2. The Duplication Game - To play this variation on the classic Kim’s Game, go out and gather a small collection of items from the local environment, like feathers, pine cones, pebbles and leaves. Challenge your toddler, with your help, to search the area for the same objects. Collect them up and then come back to the original collection and match the paired objects. You can take this to the next level and make it a bit more difficult by showing them the original collection of objects for a few minutes and then asking them to find matching items from memory. This game will help them develop their memory and observation skills.
   
3. Create a cairn - Cairns are man-made towers of natural stones, usually built as a landmark or a memorial, and making them is a great activity for kids. All you need to do is gather a range of flat rocks and pebbles in different sizes, and then stack them in order, with the largest at the bottom and the smallest at the top. Invite your child to make changes to the structure of their cairn, such as using a foundation of lots of smaller stones, and see if it still stands? This improves gross and fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and concentration as they experiment with finding the stones’ balancing points to see how tall they can make their cairn.
   
4. Potato peeler whittling - Whittling sticks is a great outdoor activity that can be almost meditative, and providing a potato peeler rather than a knife makes it much safer. Your toddler can use the peeler to whittle the bark off a stick, and then use felt tip pens to decorate it. Stick a feather to the end, and it becomes a magic wand. Whittling helps hand-eye coordination, and decorating the whittled sticks promotes creativity and imagination. For younger toddlers, do the whittling for them and then invite the decorating.
   
5. Flower crowns - This is a lovely activity and gives children opportunities to role-play being fairies, woodland nymphs or royalty. Go for a walk and collect flowers, leaves and grasses along the way, which your child can then weave into a nature-inspired crown. You could make a classic daisy chain garland or knot grasses to create a wreath, together. As an additional learning activity, you might want to encourage early plant ID skills! Buy a flower identification guidebook or borrow one from the library so your child can identify the blooms and blossom they’ve gathered.
   
6. Clay play - Clay is a great natural modelling material, and can be combined with things that your child finds outdoors to make fascinating creations. Playing with the tactile material is good for fine motor control and has the same satisfying sensation as making mud pies. One fun idea is to make a hedgehog body out of clay, and then stick pine needles in to make its spines. Or just enjoy the sensation of playing with the clay and pressing objects into the soft surface. We’ve made gorgeous hanging decorations by using found objects from the forest floor, pressed into clay and left to air dry.
   
7. Build a den - Building a den is a brilliant back-to-nature challenge that will awaken your child’s inner caveman, and it’s a great project to get stuck into with a group of children of varying ages. Find some thick, long sticks and work together to create a shelter, either by leaning them up against a tree, or by lashing them together with string at the top for a tipi-style den. You could take an old sheet out with you to give your den-building more scope. This is a good test of problem-solving skills. Ask your toddler what you should do next at each step of the den building process. Explore their ideas. Involve your child in working out how to balance the sticks and ensure they remain upright. Of course running over the woodland floor searching for sticks and dragging them back to ‘camp’ encourages physical dexterity too!
   
8. Woodland dragons - Your child may well have played with chalks on pavements, but giant chalks are also good for drawing on trees. The textured bark is really satisfying to draw on, helping children develop fine motor skills, pencil grip and mark-making, as well as creativity. Dragons are a firm favourite. You can make your own mythical beasts. Try looking for knots in trees that look like dragons’ eyes, and using the chalks to draw on the surrounding area: the bumpy bark makes brilliant scaly skin.
   
9. Campfire cooking - Cooking on a campfire is a thrilling experience for children. Obviously follow basic safety rules: make sure they’re closely supervised, don’t light fires under overhanging branches or near tree roots, and always have water on hand. Using a fire pit or basket will help to keep the fire contained. Whittle a stick to a point using a potato peeler, spear a marshmallow, and help your toddler toast it over the fire. Once cooked, sandwich it between two chocolate biscuits to make smores. Or make your own damper. Most toddlers will enjoy assisting with the first part – mixing - and will need a parent to do the latter part – the cooking over a fire. Mix 2 parts flour to 1 part liquid (milk or water or a combination of the two), with a pinch of salt. Combine to make a slightly sticky dough. Add more water or flour as needed. Take a small lump and wrap it around a stick and cook it over the fire. When cooked through it should sound hollow when tapped. Eat, dipped in honey, or just enjoy on its own.
   
10. Giant bubbles - This hands-on science activity is much more fun than blowing bubbles from a tiny pot. Combine six cups of water, one cup of washing-up liquid, and half a tablespoon of glycerine (this is the magic ingredient and is available from chemists). Tie a piece of string of any length into a circle, dip it into the bubble mix and then waft it around to make giant bubbles. For older kids you might want to experiment with how much to mix the solution to make the best bubbles, and see which weather conditions are the best for bubble-blowing.
    
11. Construct a labyrinth - Using sticks, create a maze of any size on the ground for everyone to find their way around by following the paths they’ve laid. A very simple labyrinth pattern can be found online or make an easy spiral. Encourage everyone who walks the path to take a treasure into the centre and to leave it as a gift for the forest creatures or the fae folk.
    

Rebecca works at bournemouthcollegiateschool.co.uk, with children from Kindergarten to year 6, getting stuck into everything from pond-dipping and tepee-building, to raft-making and cooking bumblebee bread over the open fire.

IDEAS For more great ideas see theschoolrun.com

READ Forest School Adventure: Outdoor Skills and Play for Children by Dan Westall and Naomi Walmsley

VISIT childrensforest.earth to find out more about becoming a forest school practitioner or nature mentor for children