Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Forest school diary

Fire can be a useful focal point on forest trips, says Caroline Watts, forest school leader at Reflections Nursery and Forest School, Worthing, West Sussex

We build a fire almost every session, in part to help us keep warm but mainly as a focal point and so we can cook our own lunches. We have previously made pancakes, hot soup and beans over the fire. In fine summer weather, we don't always light a fire, though today we made a small fire and ate our lunch of rice salad and fromage frais around it.

The children have responsibility for gathering the wood and we have taught them how to choose the right kind of sticks for building a fire - dry and snappy. The children try to snap them to test their readiness. Children often practise building a fire when they are playing at other times and places during the session. Preparing a fire requires a great deal of concentration, care and manual dexterity, in a similar way to building towers within the nursery.

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