Cambridgeshire Footprints

By Deb Wilenski

For our second Wild Exchange meeting, supporting educators from recent Footprints projects, we were in Cambridge. We began by exploring Bramblefields Nature Reserve and then walked back to Shirley Primary School where Jane and Julie welcomed everyone into their Reception classroom.  Our focus this time was on how we connect fascinations from the woods to explorations back in school or nursery, and find ways back into the woods from these enquiries.

Bramblefields is much smaller than either Lattersey or Hinchingbrooke, but still surprising and intriguing.  We invited our group to explore the woods and meadow through ‘escaped sentences’ from A Story of Smallness and Light – the publication which grows out of some of our work there in 2012.  Once we returned to the school we took the opportunity to enact the creative connections children have been making by representing our brief experience of the reserve with chalk pastel on black paper, with our eyes closed.  This was a way to remove any worry about visual accuracy, and find a way instead of catching the experience of being in the woods, what it felt like to be there and what was discovered.

This workshop offered a journey for delegates at the Forest School Conference run by Cambridgeshire County Council.  It began outside, in the wildness on the conference doorstep (the Grafham Water Centre); then came inside for a presentation of experiences and questions from the recent Footprints projects with nursery and reception children; and continued as the group tried out together some of the ways children have furthered explorations back in the classroom - through drawing, light and projection.

The sessions ended with discussions about strengthening connections – between the places children learn, the worlds they find there, and our values and freedoms as educators.

I was surprised that I could work so easily with other people to be creative when I didn't feel creative.
I wonder why I don't do more of this at school.
I was struck by how the outside language used (by the children) is so different from inside
I was surprised that children used complex text

Deb Wilenski has run workshops for groups of educators and artists in both Hinchingbrooke Country Park and Bramblefields Nature Reserve during the spring and summer terms of 2014. We have worked together freely on sunny spring mornings but also been huddled under tarpaulins through thundery summer storms.

Thank you, it was calming, relaxing and at a slower pace. I haven’t been out in the woods in a long time.

It reminds me to always look beyond the classroom wall.

The creativeness of the children that can be developed through exploration will stick in my memory.

(By Ruth Sapsed) I spent this morning with the reception class from Shirley Primary School in Bramblefields, their local nature reserve. This is their fifth week of coming for the whole morning and they will go every week now until the end of term.

We had finished our Footprints project with them last July  and it has taken a while to re-establish the work. Two of their team have been doing their Forest School training and they’ve also been working with their PTA to fundraise for waterproofs and tarpaulins. But now they are back and they are beaming. Big broad smiles greeted me from children and adults alike. Of course the fresh green leaves everywhere and even some sunshine gave it an added glow but more importantly I met a class of children leading their own explorations and a group of educators open to listening.

CCI’s routine of a morning out in the woods followed by an afternoon returning to the woodland fascinations back in the classroom has been kept. Storying is still at the heart of the work and Mrs Taylor barely left the circle this morning as child after child asked to have her scribe their stories.

And the other reception class have also established their own programmes of visits. For that class it is a Thursday spent out in the reserve and then back in the classroom revisiting the work of the morning.

It was good to see ‘the climbing tree’ as central to the children’s interests as with last year’s group. So far no secret gardens have been discovered but I heard about worlds that bounce both in some of this morning’s stories and as a name some children were using for part of the woods.

And this year parents too are joining the group regularly. Today I met Adam and Maddocks’ Dads who both talked of their pleasure in seeing their children outdoors in nature like this. Maddocks’ Dad is from South Wales and told me how surprised he was that this sort of thing could happen in a town. Adam’s Dad has grown up with Bramblefields on his doorstep and hadn’t realised these quieter wooded areas on the side existed.  He told me how Adam is full of talk about his time in the woods and has been sharing it with his sister who starts in the nursery in September.  He wished that he’d had this opportunity as a kid.

(By Julie Chambers, reception's nursery nurse, Shirley Primary School) Here we are again in Bramblefields. It’s a lovely sunny morning and the children’s excitement is palpable as we walk to the reserve.We sit together in our log circle and everyone suddenly seems very relaxed and calm.We can take our time this morning, there is no pressure to rush and the conversation flows beautifully. Out here we seem to be experiencing slow time, and it feels wonderful!

The children take the lead during the safety brief, they can articulate clearly what we need to do to keep ourselves safe and why. Knowing that they can recall these rules makes the bond of trust between us grow.

They are eager to start their exploring, discovering and adventuring. When you look at the physical environment from the child’s point of view it must seem extremely challenging. The stinging nettles and brambles must appear huge to them, but their resilience is astounding and they take all of this in their stride.

There are many chasing games going on throughout the reserve. These are by no means simple games though, they have a high level of sophistication. When you watch and listen carefully the children are following some very complicated, unspoken rules that seem to evolve and change so rapidly that my head starts to spin!

Some individuals are beginning to be more independent and are moving away from adults with their friends.

The ‘climbing tree’ is very popular and each child climbs with an adult close by.

There are many smiles and celebrations from their friends below when they reach the top of the bough. This recognition of their friends struggles is heart-warming. These significant moments are recorded in our memories and on camera. Significant moments that will have a lasting impact, raising the children’s self esteem.

Suddenly, I glance at my watch and can’t believe how time has rushed by, as if the earth is spinning faster this morning. Many stories have been told, with Jane scribing for the story tellers.

These tales are retold and enjoyed by the whole class. It reminds me of Deb’s ‘unconditional positive regard’ for all ideas when listening to the children’s narratives. In this way they will continue to offer their stories and these will grow in sophistication, given time.

Back in the classroom the writing continues, with Kyrone producing a book, including illustrations. Other children were inspired by Kyrone’s efforts and chose to write their own narratives too. They seem to have a new conception of themselves as authors.

The levels of concentration seem to have been raised during afternoon activities in the classroom. A large group of boys worked collaboratively making ‘chocolate cake’ in the ‘mud kitchen’ for almost half an hour! Cameron and Riley spent much time with magnifying glasses being “scientists’ and investigators” looking closely at shells, gourds, stones and crystals. Mrs. Logan who was working with them said that they had noticed things that she hadn’t! Cameron continued his investigations and started to look at everything in the classroom through his magnifier.

Enara spent much time working with clay and added sticks to create a figure. The figure then became the main character in a narrative which Jane also scribed for her.

There were delightful smiles from her as her story was read aloud to the rest of the class.

(By Deb Wilenski) Lattersey Nature Reserve was fantastic yesterday.  Ruth and I returned to catch up with staff and children from Kidzone Nursery who now visit the woods regularly following our Footprints project in Winter 2012.  The reeds were high, the woods mossy and green, and the water, as Mark put it, was like silver foil – smooth, bright and shining.  It was the perfect place for a new adventure to begin, as eight nursery children came to the woods for their very first time.

As we watched these children exploring through the morning it felt very different to our first time ever in Lattersey a year ago – when everything was new to staff and children alike.  This time the children were immediately intrepid, inventive, energetic explorers and the adults were strikingly confident, knowledgeable about the place and how to work in it, and above all relaxed.  Mark and Steve both commented that they thought the adults’ confidence directly affected how the children responded to the reserve – there are so many ways we communicate our fears and anxieties unconsciously, as well as our calmness and attention.

The values we explored in our 2012 Footprints work together were: time, letting children lead, and equality (that everyone should have a chance to take part and shape the experience).  These values are very firmly at the core of Kidzone’s practice now.  The children are encouraged to explore freely, making decisions about where to go and what to do there; they are thoughtfully accompanied by the adults who listen to them, observe, and share what they notice.    There is minimal ‘equipment’ – just a tarpaulin to sit on, a drink and snack, and signs to tell dog-walkers there are children in the reserve.  It’s an uncluttered approach which makes children’s own discoveries central.  Above all the adults seem to appreciate and enjoy each child’s powerful curiosity and identity as an explorer – they are very clear about why they still come to the woods, and why they will continue coming in this way.

In a single morning the children journeyed right round the reserve, several times, sometimes together, often forging ahead or finding a new way by themselves, but in sight of an adult.  They also stopped to explore more slowly – climbing trees, finding ways to slide down and scale the steep slopes, moving through the reeds together without speaking – but fully communicating with their bodies, laughter, and singing.

We will continue working with Kidzone a number of times this year as we build their experience into an ongoing exchange – developing practice, and finding ways to communicate experiences, questions and insights to other educators who would like to work in this way. We are also bringing Footprints practitioners together from the last three projects – to meet once a term as a professional group, keen to hear about each other’s learning, and to keep developing their own powers of creativity and imagination, through this ongoing relationship with wild places.

(By Deb Wilenski) Bramblefields is a surprising reserve – hidden behind houses and with busy pathways across it, once you come into the woods you feel like there is real wildness around you.  There are, as its name suggests, brambles – not so many or so rampant as the last time we were there in Summer 2012,  but still enough to make the undergrowth richly thick and the trees spiky with creepers.  There are  tangled edges to the woods, which in our Footprints project with Shirley Primary School last year saw the children from one of the reception classes find secret gardens, places to hide, places just to be and be with each other, many places for stories.

Watching a new class of children explore the woods now is fascinating.  Each of the two Reception classes comes out once a week for a whole morning, with a follow-up in the classroom in the afternoon.  The atmosphere is organised and calm – Julie remarked, like Steve and Mark from Kidzone about new children in the Lattersey reserve – that it’s like the group was here before.  They are confident and relaxed and seem to know where to go and what they want to do there.  Calmness was one of the core values we worked with last year – and came to understand as both quiet connection and focus, and more energetic play that shared a similar kind of concentration.

The two other core values are worth re-visiting too today: children leading, and a sense of wonder.  Although there is one organised activity most of the class explore and generate their own games, and the children mixing mud to make faces on the trees are innovating the process to find the best way of making it stick.  There is lots of hiding and finding, and some intriguing searches have begun.  Ruth spends a long time with Charlie who is making his way into the thickest of thickets, venturing round the periphery of the woods.   There is a search for a grass snake which stretches out into the whole morning, and similarly investigates the hidden places and edges of the woods.  These journeys are quieter and less obvious than the big game of hiding that can be heard across the woods, but they are intriguing and important.

Peripheral travelling is interesting for another reason too.  In the afternoon we have time to catch up with Jane and Julie to hear more about their aims for the project this year, and how the interests in the woods are being developed in the afternoon back at school.  We discuss the idea of having a research question for this year, a focus that can be re-visited as the work develops, and Julie suggests looking at social connections between children.  These often change radically in the woods, through individual transformations and new patterns of friendship, through unexpected interests and fascinations.  There is also more space for solitary exploration in the woods- and yet still an opportunity to share the ideas and experiences of ‘peripheral’ children – the sociability of  an idea is something we have seen often – Nabil’s story telling and climbing last year, Keira’s abiding interest in tiny things.   To take the question of what sociability means, and the different ways in which social connections might be made and strengthened will be fascinating, and seems to suit this reserve with its contrasts between open clear spaces and rich, hidden edges.

Part of CCI’s support this year is an offer to develop practice within a project, and to structure reflection between adults across settings. Next week will see staff groups from our last three Footprints projects meet together to share experiences and ongoing questions, and  to find ways of making their own work more visible.   As more and more educators spend time with their children in wild places, these professional exchanges will help keep strong the connections between values and practice, as well as welcoming new contacts between these settings and others interested in developing their relationships with wild exploration.

(By Deb Wilenski) Vivian Gussin Paley has been listening to kindergarten children’s stories, scribing, reading them back for many years and has written eloquently and with wonderful perception about her work with children and educators.  Here, in Wally’s Stories she recalls the moment when, for the first time, and inspired by kindness towards Wally who was often in trouble, she suggested they act out one of his stories:

It made Wally very happy, and a flurry of story writing began that continued and grew all year.  The boys dictated as many stories as the girls, and we acted out each story the day it was written if we could.

Before we had never acted out these stories.  We had dramatized every other kind of printed word – fairy tales, story books, poems, songs – but it had always seemed enough just to write the children’s words.  Obviously it was not; the words did not sufficiently represent the action, which needed to be shared.  For this alone, the children would give up play time, as it was a true extension of play. (p.12)

In our project with Shirley Primary School’s reception class in 2012, many children found their narrative voices, and we welcomed and encouraged their exploration of words.  Some began on day one, with our first visit to Bramblefields; Katie’s heroic tale of her fight with the bears was remarkable for its drama and clarity:

Katie:  Cherish, guess what I seen?  I seen a hairy bear.  It was up there in those trees. I went in the far away forest.  I saw hairy bears over there – they were climbing on my head.  And guess what I did, I fighted them.  I killed them.  I killed the bear with my gun.  And when I came home guess what I found?  I found no-one, ‘cos they were all hiding.

Other stories were shorter but no less momentous.  Oliwia who was first to climb the tree with no branches, told me she had never climbed before, and exclaimed:   I didn’t.  And I have now.  Her words marked not only the beginning of intrepid and skilled physical exploration, but a desire to speak, in the woods and in the classroom, far more than she had done before.

We all worked closely with this process of recognising and encouraging children’s authorship.  Through our ten weeks together we scribed stories, collected stories and made them visible in the classroom, we often began and ended our time together by sharing stories, and used photographs as a way of inventing as well as recounting narratives.

This year, coming in to support Julie and Jane in their continuing exploration of Bramblefields, Ruth and I wondered whether the stories children were telling might be used as an even richer resource.  We described Paley’s method of dramatizing children’s own narratives – and the simple use of masking tape to mark out a ‘stage’ on the carpet.  We wondered if the stories children told could be used by Jane and Julie’s class as material – their own script for acting out – and what might develop as a consequence.

Because the children had just been involved in the Christmas play, Julie could introduce the idea of a stage in the classroom with some familiarity.  She remarked that the children easily picked up the idea, and with it the way they could act out their own narratives.  When Ruth and I visited last week the practice was beautifully established and truly exciting.  Even on our walk back from the woods children were asking if they could ‘do my story’ this afternoon, with a clear sense of anticipation and intent.

And we saw wonderful stories unfold.  Julie read each story sentence by sentence, very slowly and carefully, giving each phrase its time and importance.  The author stood in the middle of the circle and in the role of stage producer/director chose people to play the parts needed.  There were no props or costumes.  The children made everything out of themselves: we saw a spiky dragon come to life, a dark cave, a ‘gynormous pink castle’; there was a dual between the Hulk and a fire-spitting dragon that was beautifully choreographed in slow motion.  When the director struggled with an idea, help was offered from the circle of children, how to make the invisible woman disappear, how to play the role of ‘the dark’.  Authors worked with authority and skill, a solution was found for every dramatic demand, there was a strong sense of shared understanding, social and imaginative connection, and as Paley has described so often, of kindness.

(By Ruth Sapsed) We met with 48 members of Cambridgeshire’s Forest School Network on a warm Monday evening to present our work. We invited the group to visit the woods and take a moment to record their own ‘map’ of that experience as the children had done. Ben Wilson, the class teacher, also joined us and enthusiastically shared  his insights and also the challenges of bringing the special qualities found in the woods back into his classroom.

Earlier that evening we had met with Peter Hobbs, the Senior Ranger at the Park, to discuss plans for the Fantastical Guide to the Park that we are working on. His comment as we shared the proposed list of contents and details of Edwards’ invisible doors was that he too had his own invisible doors in the park – in fact he had 18. It was wonderful to talk with someone so open to thinking about how these children’s ideas can be shared with other visitors to the park.

(By Deb Wilenski) For the first time in our Footprints work we are going back.  With support from Cambridgeshire Early Years Services, CCI is working this year with our last three project partners – Cromwell Park Primary School, Shirley Community Primary School and Kidzone Childcare Services – to offer a kind of wild exchange in which educators meet without their children to talk about their experiences, listen to each other and find ways to formulate new questions, keeping core values in mind, and making this work we are so proud of visible to others.  We were really happy too that Alison Gray, education officer at Hinchingbrooke Country Park, could join us.  

Towards the end of this first twilight session Ben told us how his Reception class had reacted on hearing that other teachers were coming to talk about other children, who visited other woods.  Their reaction was fascinating.  Paraphrased by Ben as what, there are more woods? the children’s amazement was quickly followed by burning questions: do they have Long Far-Away Land, is there a Living Room, is there Dinosaur Land?… I was struck not only by the potential for exploration in these questions, but how they related to our own process of exchange.  Orientating ourselves, and wondering about similarity and difference, was exactly what we had been doing for the last hour and a half.  There is always a degree of revelation in coming together as educators – that other educators are out there asking similar questions, searching for solutions, building enquiries.  We are fascinated by what connects our experiences, and how similar they can be, as well as the striking differences.

We began the evening by sharing our collective experience and expertise: what did we already know about this work?  We used images form the projects to remind us and offered blank cards to add important things that weren’t represented.  Julie remembered Viktor’s pride and excitement in hearing his story read back to the whole class, his new sense that I am a writer.  Mark recalled having to learn to let go of children and what this enabled him to learn about their competence, resilience, and independence.  Ben had seen clearly two big changes in his children – boys becoming creative explorers of the imagination, girls growing into confident leaders.  There were many examples of transformation – children coming alive and, literally for some, finding their voice in the woods.  We all tracked significant shifts in social relationships and connections, and could describe too shifts in ourselves – a return to fundamental values, important changes in practice and understanding.​

Having mapped out some of the ‘known lands’ of our experience, we turned to the unknown. What did we want to learn more about?  There were questions of comparison – what would it be like to be in the woods for the whole year?  What languages would children develop in their wild explorations and follow-up sessions in the classroom?  Would stories still be important?  Would so many lands be found again?   And there were questions of focus – how could we enable children to explore what really, fundamentally mattered to them?  How might these children’s experiences be used to introduce other classes or groups to the woods?

Which brought us on to our final question:  who do we want to share this work with?  There is on-going communication with parents that Kidzone in particular want to develop further, and we discussed ways that are most likely to be successful – making use of short instant communication through social networking, as well as documentation to raise the project’s profile.  There were important invitations made between these educators to visit each other’s wild places – the more woods – and ground discussions in first-hand knowledge.  There were ideas about how to share our work with colleagues within settings too, and invite them to visit sessions in the woods.  And then there were the burning questions of children.  Ben suggested that children from different settings could ask each other questions – if the children in his class wanted to know whether the woods in Bramblefields have Long Far-Away Land, who better to ask than the children who go there?  Experts on wild places are sitting in all our classes.  Their conversations are likely not only to be fascinating, but to make reading, writing and communicating an absolute necessity.  And we might get to find out why their woods are small, why there are more woods, what happens when we let children share stories, what we can learn when the questions children really want to ask are put at the heart of our explorations.

(By Deb Wilenski) The first day we worked with Ben and his class from Cromwell Park Primary School last year was marked by snowfall, re-shaping the woods in Hinchingbrooke into unknown white lands.  Just over a year later, as Ruth and I returned last week, there was whiteness of a different kind;  a low lying and settled mist kept company with us in the woods, softening boundaries, shifting perspectives, making the familiar mysterious again.   I half expected the children to be tentative in this atmosphere, but they seemed completely at home.  Meeting in the same Living Room space that Fareedá and Kerensa had found last year, they had clear ideas about where they wanted to go, and with a phenomenal amount of support from parents, their explorations could easily extend into different parts of the woods.

Ben began the morning by sharing a story with us all from the notebook he brings to the woods. It was Jim’s story from the previous week, an intriguing story of journeys and lands: Through some mud, over the log, under the branches of the trees.  Blue land is no more.  It’s got down because it’s rotten.  Yellow land is starting.  Jim had plans for this week too, to go over the path to the unknown land.  Another child picked up a phrase form Jim’s story and said they were going to find a new story, of mountain no more.  Lots of children wanted to go back to the mountain where the week before they had got completely covered in mud.

The woods were beautiful this morning, not just because of the mist and the tall trees, and the lands and stories unfolding.  But because of Ben’s calm confidence, his authentic interest in the children’s explorations; because of the way children listened to each other, and because of the gentle way adults gave them space and quiet attention too.  It was beautiful because we could really experience the woods – Ben takes nothing with him, no equipment ‘just in case’.  He trusts that children will find their own way to be interested in where they are, and that this will be enough.  He has a class of confident, happy, resilient children to show for it.

The children have begun mapping their places in the woods back at school, marking the spaces and landmarks they have discovered so far.  The mountain is represented many times, and after walking with a group of seven children into the mists, and beyond where they have stopped before, we find ourselves curving back to arrive at its muddy slopes.  Lots of the children are already making their ways up, improvising with sticks used as walking poles to arrive triumphantly at the top.

I am with Oliver who at first said oh no this is where the path ends as we reached the limit of one of the tracks.  But having come away from the track and back into the woods, he discovered thetreasure ship – part of an ongoing narrative of pirates in the woods, and then the other side of the mountain.  He had never been down the back of the mountain before, and at the end of the morning told everyone excitedly:  We went to two mountains – the one we found before and the one next to it – on the other side.

As we gathered together back in the Living Room, and listened to each other’s discoveries Ben told us of the adventure he had been on with a group of girls, through the magic space (which was a magic door last year) and into places where there areother places – another Moss Land, another Mountain, are there in these woods two of everything?  This language of ‘another-ness’ and the intriguing idea of two of everything seems a perfect way to be exploring the woods with this second class of children, this second year.