After a couple of days back at my desk trying to catch up with three days away - which is roughly a year in AI terms - I'm genuinely relieved to be back in the woods. And somehow, after days of grey and bleh, we've walked back into sunshine. The woods don't owe us this weather in March and I'm not taking it for granted.
Day three ended with me trying to figure out how to combine software engineering with being outdoors. I haven't figured it out yet. But I have figured out that the two days back at the screen made me properly miss being here, which tells me something.
Bean Bags, One Tea In
The day started with a name game - Forest School names, bean bags being thrown around, everyone trying to remember who's who while catching things. That is a lot of thinking that early in the morning with only one tea in. Good fun though. There's a particular quality to a group of adults lobbing bean bags at each other at nine in the morning that I don't get from a stand-up meeting on Teams.
Then into a knot and a review of day three. The rhythm of the days is becoming familiar now - knot, recap, then into whatever fresh challenge the morning has in store. I'm starting to find comfort in that structure, which is ironic given how far outside my comfort zone most of the content pushes me.
Friedrich Fröbel and the Camera of Doom
We'd each been given a learning theorist to research and present on. Mine was Friedrich Fröbel - the man who invented kindergarten. Not the building. The concept. The idea that young children learn through play, that play is not a distraction from education but the foundation of it. He championed the notion that children should be nurtured like plants in a garden - kindergarten literally means "children's garden" - and that self-directed activity, creativity, and social interaction are how real learning happens.
I liked Fröbel. His thinking maps neatly onto what I already believe from running The Code Zone - that children learn best when they're making something they care about rather than following instructions they don't. Presenting on him wasn't the problem.
The problem was the camera.
The presentations were filmed on our phones for evidence. Uploaded, recorded, preserved forever in digital form. If there's one thing I find more uncomfortable than presenting to a group, it's being filmed while presenting to a group. Presenting is temporary. Being filmed is permanent. My brain understands this distinction very clearly and responds to it with an appropriate level of dread.
Farewell comfort zone. Was nice knowing you. Again.
But as we've established, the group is fantastic. Supportive, encouraging, and nobody makes you feel like you're floundering even when you absolutely are. I got through it. The cortisol was allowed to settle. We moved on.
Hostage, and What Play Actually Is
Presentations done, we played Hostage - another "hide in the woods and try to make it back to the tree without being caught" game. I'm starting to properly enjoy these. There's something about being a grown adult, crouching behind a tree, trying to time a sprint across open ground without being spotted, that just makes you feel alive in a way that a Task Board never will. It's good fun just being silly, and I'm saying that as someone who a week ago would have found the whole concept slightly mortifying.
As always with Forest School, there's purpose behind the play. The game led naturally into a discussion about what play actually is and how it fits into Forest School. Spoiler: it's pretty fundamental. Play isn't something that happens around the edges of the real learning. Play is the learning. Fröbel knew this two hundred years ago. Forest School builds on it.
From play we segued into stories - splitting into groups to write our own, and discussing how storytelling fits into a Forest School session. Stories as a way to frame an experience, to give context to an activity, to spark curiosity before you've even stepped into the woods. Like the How Hows from day one - mythical creatures who left wool in a tree. That's a story doing real work, turning a piece of string into something meaningful.
Land Art and Types of Woodland
A brief session on types of woodland - broadleaf and coniferous, their characteristics, what grows where and why. And then, because this is Forest School and nothing stays theoretical for long, we created land art representing the different woodland types. How else would you explore it?
Land art is one of those things that sounds vaguely wishy-washy until you do it, at which point it becomes quietly absorbing. You're arranging natural materials on the ground - leaves, sticks, stones, moss - to create something that represents an idea. It's not about artistic talent. It's about paying attention to what's around you and making something from it. The process is the point, not the product. Which, yes, is Forest School in a nutshell.
Free Play and Tiny Mushrooms
The rest of the afternoon was free play time. A chance to experience Forest School from the participant's perspective - choose what you want to do, follow your own curiosity, make something, explore something, just be in the woods.
Naturally, I grabbed a knife.
It was only an hour, so I wanted something I could disappear into and focus on completely. I whittled out some tiny mushrooms. Little wooden toadstools, each one slightly different, shaped by whatever the wood wanted to become as much as by what I was trying to make. It's meditative in the most literal sense - my brain empties of everything except the wood and the blade and the shape emerging from between the two.
I was pretty pleased with them. Everyone else made some really lovely forest creations, or got stuck into fire lighting for the Kelly kettle. Thank goodness for that, because it was indeed time for a tea. Four days in the woods has confirmed that outdoor learning runs on tea in exactly the same way that software development runs on coffee.
Getting There
Another great day. And something's shifting. Not dramatically - I haven't had an epiphany or a life-changing moment of clarity. It's more like the gears are slowly meshing. The theory sessions are getting easier to engage with. The group activities are getting less terrifying. The rhythm of the days - knot, game, theory, practical, reflection - is starting to feel natural rather than new.
There's a lot of theory still to learn. I know that. And I know that the practical stuff - the knots, the tools, the fire, the whittling - is where I'm comfortable, and the presentations and group sharing and being-filmed-while-talking is where I'm not. But I'm starting to find a comfort in doing things I find hard, which is a strange sentence to write and a stranger thing to feel. It's not that the hard things are getting easy. It's that being uncomfortable is getting more familiar, and familiar is a kind of comfortable in itself.
The practical stuff I'm fine with. The rest? It's coming. Slowly, unevenly, and with occasional mime-based setbacks. But it's coming.
