Forest school & outdoor learning
Forest School and Outdoor Learning is among our proudest features. Our own forest area provides an alternative learning environment, where education is in, for, and about, the natural world. The combination of freedom and responsibility is beneficial to those with reduced confidence or behaviours that challenge. This is place where valuable life skills are learnt. This includes communication, team-work, problem-solving, responsibility, resilience and self-regulation. Students also learn to calculate risk and manage stress by working with tools and cooking on an open fire. These life lessons can then be taken back to the classroom, and carried forward into life after Priory.
We are extremely proud of our outdoor learning space, which includes a small animal enclosure, chicken coop, vegetable plots, polytunnel, insect hotel, messy play area, hammocks, a parachute canopy and established woodland; we also have a plot at the local allotment.
The school has its own flock of Pekin Bantams, a small, and friendly breed of chicken. Dad Howie, Mum Lucky and their three daughters who hatched last summer. We also have Dwarf Lop Eared Rabbits named Forest and Autumn, who were rescued and adopted in 2018
Out Forest School provision continues to expand and evolve. Students are learning how to safely explore the woodland environment and how to collect and sort the natural flora and fauna found within their school’s forest. They are also learning and experiencing how to survive and thrive in the wilderness, learning how to build fires, make water filters, whittle, construct shelters, and cook and prepare food over an open flame. They are able to discover how to appropriately use tools, such as flint and steels, peelers, rakes, saws, secateurs, wheelbarrows, and buckets. Students have planted and cultivated their own crop of vegetables, seeing the process through from seed-to-soup.
Our students have had the opportunity to learn how to take good care of animals, and how they have feelings too. Millie, our school dog, now visits every week.
Students have discovered how they can interact with their woodland, either by creating individual and communal forest art, or by maintaining the woodland and helping local flora and fauna to thrive, becoming guardians of the forest.
