The Story of James' Log
To those looking in on forest school it can seem very random. Some children may be engaged in an offered task, others may be playing, while others will have reached the stage that pretty much all reach eventually: self-motivated learning. This is known by many names: learning through play, discovery play, child-centred learning to name a few. A significant part of the purpose of the forest school leader is to guide children just enough that they can start making decisions about what they want to find out. It may be that this is inspired by a single discovery or by an emerging passion. The leader can then help the child, when asked, offering resources and posing thought provoking questions.
In the early sessions it can seem to an observer that what is going on is directed teaching. Indeed, this does happen in order to progress a child’s confidence to leap into their own chosen learning. Each session at Wayfarers Forest School offers a planned activity. This is designed to encourage engagement with the environment and to advance some useful skills to make being in nature a more stimulating experience. It may be based around one of our senses or start with a story or involved making something from found materials. All the offered activities have an open ended component which presents each child with the choice to follow a line of enquiry if they chose to do so. In general all the children enjoy these activities but take up of the open ended element varies. Through use of chatting with a child or presenting a question to consider it is possible to draw an individual to open up to making a discovery of their own. The greater the opportunity to attend forest school regularly, the greater the likelihood that the leap to individual discovery will be.
On this particular day, spring was on the cusp of bursting forth. Each larch had new trim of green on her twiggy dress and we were blessed with warm sunshine filtering down to our home place. We’d read Stick Man by Julia Donaldson, a tale well known to the group. Then we had foraged for twigs, leaves and woodbine strings to assemble stick people of our own. A group of three children had decided to make use of a hollow tree base as a home for their stick people. Together they assembled furniture from bark and twigs, used leaf litter for bedding and moved on to playing out a story for their stick characters. Another group had left their stick people on the tarp and were busily working out how to move a substantial wind fallen branch from A to B in order to make a stick person the same size as themselves.
James, usually in the thick of it with a gaggle of friends, was wandering on his own, using stick now and again to poke at rotten logs left by the foresters some time previously. He levered up bark and peered at the life beneath. He tested the resistance of various amounts of rot to the force of his stick. All the time he was completely absorbed in what he was doing. It was tempting to butt in- would he like a magnifying glass? A pooter? An insect or fungi ID sheet? Something made me hold back. I turned from a lively chat about the stick people's home in the hollow tree to see James rolling a chunky log towards the home place. His ‘Look at this! Look at this!’ summoned a small group from what they were doing. James stood the log on its end and pointed at, what at first glance looked like mud, coating the top of the stump. Crawling in and out of the rotted away crevices were tiny pale grey and tan somethings. At this point magnifying glasses were fetched and a chorus of hushed ‘Wows’ and ‘Look and thats’ was heard. James had found manca and juvenile woodlice feasting on the rotten wood. The mud-like topping of the log was the by-product of their intense munching. All the group had seen adult woodlice but none had considered what the young might be like; cue a discussion how woodlice grow and change compared to ourselves. Did we know of any other creatures which changed form like the woodlice? Frogs spawn was called out then tadpole then caterpillar and butterfly. So, not all creatures start out as mini versions of adults then? Are the creatures which change form like us in any way? How are they different? Suddenly we were making simple classifications. We talked about what the stuff on the top of the log looked like- mud, sawdust, earth were all proposed. If the woodlice stay on the log what will happened to the log? A bit more tricky this. It will be their house was a popular idea. But they’re eating it, so…they’ll have to move house when they’ve eaten it all. A fair point made. What will their house become? Mud! They’re making mud! What grows in mud? Plants! Trees! Flowers! The mental rush was exciting- smiling faces, bright eyes. We had started with a rotten log and in the space of twenty minutes we were naturalists, explorers, scientists.
As the session came to an end and everyone gathered at our home place, everyone who hadn’t already done so had a good peer at the tiny world on the top of James’ log. James and the group who’d shared his discovery told all about what they’d found out (with a little prompting). Photos of the log were taken and it was agreed it should go back where it was.
James has left pre-school now and no longer comes to forest school, I see him from time to time when he and his mum are on their way home from school. He always waves and says hallo. Last week he said ‘My woodlice will be all grown up now. D’you reckon they’ve eaten all that log yet?’ Of course James could have learnt about all this from a book, the telly or the internet but this wouldn’t have been his discovery. The excitement and the consequent learning may not have been so intense. Such learning by discovery is the very essence of forest school, learning that stays with the learner and instills curiosity and a love of nature.