A first visit to Bear Woods for the Class of 2020

The 27 children have all settled into nursery over the past few weeks. This week has been their first in the big class after spending almost 4 weeks in smaller groups of 15 and 12 for just 2 hours a day. This week and next they will be staying for 3 hours before starting full time from the 12th October (all going well!)

We are normally outside every morning for at least an hour and have 2 outdoor days when we stay out all day, just coming in for story and dinner. This year, due to Covid-19 we are staying outside 3 days and only coming in for snack and for an hour 2 days. 

Today all the children got on their rain gear and went for a visit to Bear Woods. We have now been using this wooded space within school grounds since 2014 and one of our current P7 children gave it the name Bear Woods. It is now truly a proper woods and the children have the opportunity to hide among the trees and climb on a big log we have up there and climb up the slope using a rope and roll down the hill. They enjoy looking at their older brothers and sisters over the fence in the main school playground. We have a shed up there where we can keep chalk and tarps etc. so the children had a lot of fun drawing on the shed. There are also mirrored numbers hidden amongst the trees. 

There are yellow lines at the bottom and top of the hill and these show the children where to stop and wait for an adult. The children were brilliant at listening to all the new instructions and stopping before walking up the hill to find the gate into Bear Woods. We had snack up there and the the children were free to explore the area. 

After an hour we all walked back down to the yellow line and stopped before walking back into nursery. 

You can read some more about Bear Woods in this post.

https://nosuchthingasbadweather.blogspot.com/2014/09/preparing-for-visit-to-bear-woods.html