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Forest School Sessions Forest School sessions are an innovative educational approach that focuses on the ‘processes of learning’ rather than ‘content transfer’. Forest School is play based, with child led learning at its centre, taking place regularly in an outdoor setting. Forest School sessions provide a place for the child’s spark of creativity to be ignited within a rich, ever changing and limitless learning environment, naturally stimulating the development of motor skills, speech and language,

Outdoor Classroom Day Blog by Jon Cree Communing with another – a ceremonial transformation. Encounters with a nettle. This week I experienced a palpable shift in one of the teachers on a workshop I was facilitating – let’s call her Jane (real name left out for anonymity). The workshop entitled “lost words”, is based on the book by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, that seems to have swept up the country’s schools in its magic.

Young Nature Leaders Initiative – Mental Health Awareness Week It’s been an incredible journey on the Young Nature Leaders Initiative course with Circle of Life Rediscovery.  Spending a day out in the woods each month has been a wonderful and grounding experience and it has given me a tranquil space to feel connected to nature. If I was ever feeling stressed or anxious before the session, that was eased once I got to the woods

What is International School Grounds Month? Each year, in May, the International School Grounds Alliance (ISGA) calls on schools around the world to take their pupils outside to celebrate International School Grounds Month. They believe that school grounds are hugely important to children and youth, and shape their experience of the world around them. Why is it important? In some cases, school or nursery grounds are the first place children have the opportunity to become

Mental Meandering and the Outdoors By Kate Macairt (Director CLR) Children of all ages need to go outdoors to support their mental health and wellbeing. Children need the enriched sensory inputs which outdoors can provide. This does not have to be a beautiful wild landscape or forest, there are wild spaces in every city worth discovering. In her TED talk (30/9/16) Emma Marris stresses there is no division between humans and Nature. We are part

Neuroscience: Mental meandering and the Outdoors –  System 1 and System 2 By Kate Macairt (Director CLR) I am inside a box sitting by a window and the window is slightly open. Outside my window perched on a telephone line are 2 swallows; whatever it is they are communicating to one another, it is clearly something of great interest to them. Their chattering is a non-stop percussive melody, a complex composition with background hum of

Health, Well-Being and Spirituality: An Unspoken Connection By Salvatore Gencarelle Health, Well-Being and Spirituality. The anguish that people are afflicted with has little to do with injury, physical disease, starvation, or other ills that historically caused great sorrow. Modern medicine and industry have all but eliminated those types of pain. The new illness that people suffer is from their inner world. It is more elusive, more subtle, and thereby more difficult to distinguish. If we