The year 3 children from St John’s School Kingston enjoyed the second of their Forest Schools up at Kingston University. One of the benefits from using the University site is that the whole class can be together on a class topic session.
Today the session was all about extreme earth and, after this weekend’s weather, couldn’t have been more topical. We checked the site and all the trees had survived yesterday’s storm and we were good to go.
The class was split into three groups, with each having to construct a city out of woodland finds and natural materials. The children were lucky as we had Kingston University Ambassadors along to to help them, out, which included a civil engineer, two architects, a computer games programmer and a phycologist. They put the Ambassadors to task and together worked on their designs for their cities.
After a fun break, we returned to the cities and learnt what the groups had thought about whilst building together. They had included thoughts about defences against natural disaster. We had great fun testing their work with a tsunami, a hurricane and an earthquake.
Before lunch, we had a fun filled game of tug of war, including one against all the staff, you can ask the children who won! We then relocated to the fire circle and put our fire lighting skills though their paces, and it has to be said that all the children had remembered all the information from last time and were very quick and safe in lighting their fires. We, of course, brought all of their fires together as one and ended the session with toasted marshmallows.
Big thanks to Kingston University for continuing to support us and in particular to Mark and the Student Ambassadors who are great fun and without whom the trip wouldn’t be possible.