21 October 2025 – Carousel Conker Activities (P5 Class)

This is a lesson that I did within my Forest School Club previously. Given its success and popularity, I was very keen to provide my P5 class with the same activity and opportunity. Given the large size of my class (27 pupils), I decided to split them in half to make the session more manageable and more enjoyable for the children. While one half completed the activity in the Forest School, the other half of my class remained in the classroom with another member of staff doing literacy work. The two groups later swapped. Within the Forest School, I provided a carousel of activities; creating conker people, using conkers to make a tower, tic tac toe using sticks and conkers and curling with conkers. This approach made it easier to work one to one, while keeping structure and ensuring none of the children lost focus.
We started as normal by recapping the main Forest School rules but then progressed onto a more thorough discussion about the rules when using tools, specifically hand drills as they played a key role in the conker creations activity.
Within this discussion, I explained and demonstrated the hand drill safely:
– Wear a glove on the hand that is holding the clip.
– Hold conker firmly on a flat surface inside a clip.
– Keep drill vertical.
– Slow, controlled turning.
– Swap turns and share tools.
– Reminded the children of tool rules: sit down to drill, either both knees on the ground or on bottom, no pointing drills at others, sit at least an arm’s distance away from others and wait your turn.

I then showed the children a stimulus page with examples of conker people and utilized the opportunity for a group discussion around where chestnuts / conkers come from. Children then collected their conkers and worked 1:1 with a member of staff to use the hand drill to drill holes in the conkers which would allow them to put tooth picks into the conkers to connect their structure. Once they had finished connecting their creations, the children used various resources to decorate them and add personality, including pipe cleaners and googly eyes. The children then showed their creations to their peers.
Within the other carousel activities, the children used natural resources to play tic tac toe, used fine motor skills and problem solving to stack conkers to build towers and used various techniques to play curling with conkers.