How can we support children’s and adults’ creative relationships in the outdoors?
Working with whole class groups of Y5 and Y6 children, their teachers, teaching assistants and parent helpers, the focus of our research was to see how we could support children’s and adults’ creative relationships in the outdoor environment and explore how 5x5x5=creativity and Forest School practice complement one another to extend possibilities for creative thinking. Weekly sessions were held in Mike’s Meadow – Batheaston School’s new outdoor learning space – over a term. The space offers different environments: a copse, a giant grass covered earth newt, a fire pit and story circle – and these various areas gave us scope to extend ideas and draw on found natural materials to develop interests further. The initial provocations for each group were framed by the KS2 topics, creating links between the children’s learning indoors and outdoors. Throughout the sessions with both groups, however, we found that the environment would become a key provocation for the developing narratives of the children and enabling creative expression.
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