What is Forest School?

Forest School is a child-centred inspirational learning process, that offers opportunities for holistic growth through regular sessions. It is a long-term program that supports 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 stuff out and take risks. Forest School inspires a deep and meaningful connection to the world and an understanding of how a learner fits within it. 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 more than just potential for physical harm, but a more holistic thing, there are risks in everything we do, and we grow by overcoming them. Forest School therefore, helps participants to become, healthy, resilient, creative and independent learners.

How do we deliver this at YIS? 

Here at Yaxley Infant school we take great pride in promoting outdoor learning. We are very lucky that we have an onsite area that is perfect for such activities. The children take part in Forest School sessions weekly whatever the weather, come rain or shine. This gives the children a fantastic understanding of seasonal differences and how the world around us changes through these.  We start off by exploring the environment and allowing the children to become confident with their new surroundings, whilst following very important rules to help keep everybody safe. Once this is embedded we move onto learning new skills allowing the children to use their imagination and freedom in this space to apply them.