Affordances of nature In Forest School, “affordances” refer to the opportunities and challenges the environment presents, influencing how individuals interact with it. These opportunities, like a fallen log or a sticks, invite actions like climbing, jumping, or creating, fostering physical skills and promoting engagement with nature. Discoveries 
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Noticing In Forest School, we take time to really notice the beauty of nature. Playing Playing hide and seek in Forest School isn’t just fun — it also helps the children develop important skills like spatial awareness, proprioception, camouflage problem-solving, patience, and cooperation, all while 
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This week we were exploring, meeting the gorse plant and building fairy houses. Gathering resources for fairy houses First we gathered resources that might be useful for building with. ‘This could be a roof.’ ‘I could use this to make a blanket.’ ‘I’m not sure 
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We are noticing really interesting things. We made sticky weed crowns. We played games and climbed. We made leaf prints with clay. Someone had a special nature birthday. We made a nature birthday cake and danced around it, finishing with cleaver birthday tea.
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The journey up to base camp is full of learning and movement. We stopped off in the meadow. On the edges was lots of stickyweed (aka cleavers, goosegrass, stickybacks etc). We started by looking closely and noticing interesting things about the stickyweed plant. We noticed 
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Junior Infants are learning so much about the forest through observation, curiosity and wonder. Our job as leaders is to follow that interest and support the learning that they are drawn towards. There was a lot of fairy magic in the woods this week. We 
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The hawthorn tree or fairy bush or May tree was our focus this week as we were celebrating Bealtaine, one of Ireland’s fire festivals celebrating the start of the summer. The bluebells are also known as a fairy flower and some stories tell of the 
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Journey to basecamp Junior Infants always notice interesting things on the way to our basecamps. Dandelion magic Dandelions are a very generous plant for children. They can colour with them, make wishes with them, make land art faces with them, make tea with them and 
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This week was the last week before the 6th class students become assistants for the younger children. They have demonstrated leadership skills in the last few weeks, learning games to teach the younger children, noticing things in nature to show them, figuring out how to 
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We can forget or just not realise how important outdoor play is in childhood (and beyond). This page from the Forest Fridays book is here to remind us. The full book is available on https://www.dspns.ie/scaip/. This week, as always, the children had lots of ideas 
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