Boost your children’s vocabulary, spelling, speaking and storytelling skills with these outdoor literacy activities for forest school.
Outdoor literacy lessons
Let’s take learning outdoors into the fresh air! We’ll give our children the space and freedom of an outdoors classroom while still building important key skills through hands-on, nature-inspired lessons.
Use these ready-made forest school literacy lesson ideas, taken from the bestselling book The Forest Classroom.
Ready-made forest school lesson plans
Make your forest school teaching easier using our ready-made outdoor lesson plans.
The Forest Classroom: a beginner’s guide to forest school will give you the confidence, ideas and practical plans to lead forest school lessons with your children.
Our best-selling guide gives you over 40 lessons plans and 16 practical printable sets that you can use in your forest school setting, school yard/playground, local park or your own backyard to run a forest-school style curriculum.
The lessons are suitable for children aged 4 to 10 and cover a broad range of subjects including nature study, math, literacy, science, arts and crafts, and wellbeing.
See more and get your copy of The Forest Classroom here, for easy, ready-made outdoor lessons you and your children will love.
Forest school vocabulary activities
The easiest way to host an on-the-spot literacy lesson is to head out on a nature walk. No materials needed – simply talk about what you see!
:: What can you see?
:: What can you hear?
:: What does this tree trunk feel like?
:: Who can think of a word to describe this leaf?
:: How does the forest make you feel today?
These open-ended questions get language following and everyone can learn as they hear from each other and are encouraged to try out new descriptions.
In The Forest Classroom you’ll also receive guides to more structured lessons that introduce a wide range of new vocabulary as we learn about the parts of a tree, clouds, food webs, and who lives in the forest.
How to use nature journals in forest school
A nature journal is a core component of outdoor literacy skills building.
Your children can each make an individual journal or work together to make a community journal.
The Forest Classroom gives you many journalling prompts and printables to get your children off to a writing start. The printable foraging guides/ journal pages for wild garlic, hawthorn, elderberries and blackberries are invitations to read, expand vocabulary, write and draw. You’ll also find many more suggestions for what to include to build a rich and diverse nature journal full of field notes, plant and animal study, poems and stories.
Outdoor literacy stations
You might also like to include outdoor literacy centres/stations in your outdoor classroom, giving your children invitations to practice core skills in a fun, nature-based, hands-on way.
:: Invite them to try mark making in the mud using twig pens
:: Make letters using twigs
:: Practise spelling with leaf letters
:: Create letter shapes using natural materials
You’ll find more details of these activities and more ideas in The Forest Classroom.
Storystones activity for forest school
Story stones are a great prompt to get children telling tales. Story stones are a set of pebbles with pictures on that you can use as a visual prompt when telling a story. They’re wonderful loose parts for children to play with, encouraging imagination, storytelling, and language skills.
Children can make their own story stones and you can also have a set ready and waiting for them to play with.
Try all the variations for how to use and develop story stones in The Forest Classroom.
The Forest Classroom :: download your ready-made forest school lesson plans
Have you got your copy of The Forest Classroom yet? It is the perfect beginner’s guide to running a successful forest school. Download your forest school guide here.
A forest classroom is a place of adventure, discovery, and imagination. It can also be a wonderful place to learn about math and science, explore art and crafts, and develop language and social skills.
The Forest Classroom is a practical guide which will show you how to engage your children in fun and educational forest-school activities.
These ready-made forest school lesson plans are suitable for forest school leaders, teachers, childcarers and parents with children aged 4 to 10, to learn in a forest, school nature area, local park or your own backyard.
Get your copy of The Forest Classroom here and you’ll be ready to head straight outdoors and enjoy teaching, using our ready-made lesson plans.
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