Forest-Friday
Forest Friday is a child-centred inspirational learning process, that offers opportunities for holistic growth through regular sessions. Through this, we support play, exploration and supported risk taking. It develops confidence and self-esteem through learner inspired, hands-on experiences in a natural setting.
The process helps and facilitates more than knowledge-gathering, it helps learners develop socially, emotionally, spiritually, physically and intellectually. It creates a safe, non-judgemental nurturing environment for learners to try new things and take risks.
Our approach to risk means that learners constantly expand on their abilities by solving real-world issues, building self-belief and resilience. We believe that risk is an important factor in the growth of a child as there are risks in everything we do, and we grow by overcoming them.
Here at Bredenbury Primary School, we are extremely proud of our outdoor learning environment. We have two very dedicated and enthusiastic practitioners who run ‘Forest Fridays’ for alternating weeks with KS1 and KS2.
During these afternoons, the children attend sessions held in our forest area which is a shaded area at the back of our field. We have bug houses, dens, a slide, shelter, tyre worm, rope swings and mud kitchen.
Our children enjoy cooking on our campfire and learning fun facts to do with the environment and wildlife.
Firm favourites have been pizzas, hot dogs, roasted marshmallows, pancakes, toast and crumpets. We even toasted hot cross buns at Easter!
Whether it be gardening, fence building, whittling or clearing our pond area, the children learn new skills every session and contribute towards purposeful projects the whole school can enjoy.
