Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Forest schools

A forest environment stimulates the use of descriptive language, says Caroline Watts, a Forest Schools leader for several schools in Kent.

Sensory language is evoked in abundance at Forest School as children experience nature's ever-changing scene. Recently, a group of four-year-olds spontaneously began to describe walking through mud, and with encouragement came up with 11 words to describe their experience: 'it's squelchy, squishy, squashy, slidey, sticky, mushy, gooey, slippy, slimy, yuck ... stuck!'

We can read stories about the world around us, but it's only by being immersed in it that we make full connections with the language it inspires. We have to feel mud under our toes to understand that it's squelchy, to mix mud to know it looks like chocolate and to dig up clay to know that it comes from the earth, and that it feels sticky.

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