Try these ideas for forest school lesson plans for summer to enjoy your outdoor classroom at the height of the year.
Summer forest school activities
The forest offers lush and quiet shade in the summer. It’s a great time to look for bugs and fruits and explore the colours of the woodland. Try these summer forest school activities with your children.
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.
Summer nature walk ideas
All through the year we’re taking thoughtful walks through our forest space, using our senses to see, touch, hear, feel and taste the different elements of the woods. Often our walks are led by our children: following the paths they want to take, talking about the things they notice along the way.
We can also include themed-walks for each season, to draw our children’s attention to new aspects of the forest and broaden our conversations.
For summer you might like to focus on your senses and head out on a Sense of Smell Walk or a Sense of Hearing Walk. By excluding some senses and magnifying one specific one on each walk we encourage our children to broaden their range of experiences in the forest and to increase the depth of their relationship with their special classroom.
The Forest Classroom has a range of themed walk ideas you can use right through the year and suggestions for a nature walk kit you can take along with you to make your walks more enjoyable and educational.
Summer nature journaling
The forest offers lush and quiet shade in the summer. Now is a great time of year to take your nature journals with you into your forest classroom en plein air, which is a French term that means ‘in the open air’. Many artists like to head outdoors to paint and draw the natural world within the nature setting.
Working en plein air lets you really feel the natural world with your senses, and your writing and drawing can be inspired by all the things you hear, smell, and feel as well as what you can see.
The Forest Classroom gives you a range of printable journal pages for writing and drawing that you can use and has many journal prompts to help you create a full and interesting journal.
Things to forage in summer
There are delicious things to forage for all year round and the summer is a great time to look out for blackberries. These glossy berries are full of vitamin C, they’re anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory, and anti-viral – and they taste delicious too!
The Forest Classroom gives you a guide to learning about blackberries, and identifying them, plus ideas for using your blackberries to make dye and a yummy blackberry crumble to eat.
Summer art lesson for forest school: nature colour wheels
For a summer art lesson in forest school, you might like to explore nature’s colour wheel.
The Forest Classroom gives you a printable colour wheel, with extra shades of brown and green to reflect your forest setting.
It also guides you through a range of activities you can lead to explore colour, including question prompts for colour conversations to boost vocabulary and descriptive skills and a ‘one plant’ focus investigation, looking at all the colours in just one leaf, flower, feather or fruit.
Summer forest school craft: flower crowns
A fun way to draw children in to spotting the variety of plant life around the forest is to make a flower or leaf crown. This is a good way to introduce ideas about nature appreciation and respect for our shared environment.
The Forest Classroom helps you guide your children to spot which plants you can pick and which ones to avoid, how to pick carefully and respectfully with thought to the other creatures in the forest who will need the plants.
It also shows you how to make a pretty flower crown – and a leaf crown which is wonderful for the autumn.
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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