P7 Year Group – ‘Raft Building’ – 27th February 2025

P7 Forest School – 27.02.25

Today I lead 3 forest school sessions for each of our P7 classes. The session was titled Raft Building and was held at the Six Mile Water River Park, Ballyclare. The weather was sunny and calm with lots of blue sky!

 As a group we then established the Forest School rules / site boundaries and outlined the purpose of the ‘base area’.

 Warm up task: We discussed the 5 senses and explain that we will be using four of our senses (sight, hearing, touch and smell) to observe our surroundings as we move around the Forest Park area – no tasting today!

 Spring time observations – We looked for and discussed signs of spring time nearing and found snowdrops, crocus and daffodils. The children also learned about buds on branches/twigs in the trees around them.

 The children collected 8 sticks and were challenged to use these to build a raft in their pairs. I modelled how to build one using 6 sticks for the deck and 2 perpendicular to the deck. The children tied their sticks together using wool and had a go at using a clove hitch knot as well as diagonal lashing. This was tricky but there were lots of super rafts built! After some great team work on display during the construction phase, we headed over to the riverbank where I got in the water to race the rafts in twos downstream. The children ran along the path to the bridge to watch their rafts as they came over the weir. Some even managed to go even further downstream!

 We celebrated success before evaluating the lesson using the Forest School faces. A great day!