A rope, a bucket, and a couple of pulleys= Fun

Today's session was largely taken up with the challenge of getting wood chip from one point to another without walking it there.  The group were given a rope a set of pulleys a couple of wooden hooks and a lot of buckets.  One of the boys took control of the setting up of a line to hang the hooks from which they could then hang the buckets from once they were filled.  This system worked for a while but they decided to tinker with the design and in the end had one of the hooks attached to a pulley and then attached two ropes to this so the pulley ran a long the static line and was controled by the two ropes from each pile.  There was some to team work and problem solving going on, although the operating of hooking the bucket on did have its moments of conflict as they worked out a rota of whose go it was.

Our tree house had its annual changing of the ropes on Sunday and past muster by the group who like to use it.  It is checked for soundness before each session but because we uses a natural fibre rope to construct it which can become weak.  We like to remove it once a year to give the tree a break which stops the rope digging into the tree as it grows.
We were treated to cake as it was one of the boy's birthdays yesterday, we almost missed singing 'happy birthday' as he had shot off to get back to his game before we had chance to start.  He was pulled back and sung to by the group led by his elder brother.
With us all trampling around the site it is amazing the amount of wildlife we keep finding, frogs being a favourite but today we found the world biggest worm.

Its great to see the respect the group show when looking at wildlife and when we need to move it to a safer area.

The best part of Forest School is when the children lead their learning by coming up with their own ideas.  At the end of the Friday session two of the boys built a seesaw from a couple of chopping blocks and an old fence post.  They first checked the post was sound by placing it on a block and walking up it before they started seesawing on it.  The experimentation the boys used as they thought about the risk of just going for it was nice to see.