Tag Archives: woodlandplay

Visit from Echoes Ecology

We were very pleased to welcome Kay and Heather from Echoes Ecology to our woods this morning. They have picked a beautiful, warm, sunny day to visit!

Kay and Heather are are conducting a Preliminary Ecological Appraisal (PEA) of our site in the woods which will document the range of habitats present and will look for signs of any protected species. This initial appraisal will inform the requirement for any future surveys.

Kay is known to us at CVN having helped us put up squirrel and bird feeders in the woods a couple of years ago. We are hopeful that our children can again be involved so that we can learn more about the creatures that live in our woods.

Visit from Learning through Landscapes

Last week a team from Learning through Landscapes Scotland visited us on a glorious sunny spring day. LtL are making 24 short films for Scottish Forestry about managing sites for regular use by early years settings and asked if they could come and see what we get up to at Gillies Hill Community Woodland. We were very happy to meet them and show them around. We were also very interested to see their film and sound equipment.

National Lottery Funding Success

We are thrilled and delighted to learn that the National Lottery Community Fund has awarded us £10000! This money will help fund the next stage of our project to develop our new nursery building in Gillies Hill Community Woodland.

If you haven’t heard about our plans or want to find our more, check out the pages on our website and/or follow our new dedicated Instagram @CVNintheWoods.

We always welcome comments and feedback so you can do that too via our feedback link. If you prefer a less technological method, give us a call on 01786 430497 or, better still, stop by and have a chat. We’re always delighted to discuss our plans. If you spot us when you’re up in the woods we can even show you some of the things we get up to!

You can support our project financially too, see “Support Us”.

Woodland Play 30 Sept 2019

What a lovely autumn day we had today in the woods. We put up a hammock and the children enjoyed taking turns swinging in it. We made a fire and, this week for a change, cooked some damper bread over it. The children kneaded the dough before we wound it like a snack around a stick and held it over the fire. The wood was very damp so we all had to work hard to keep the fire going. We collected some wood to store which will hopefully keep a little drier for future occasions.

We were back in the woods today!

It was lovely to be back in the woods today! We have a new play site and enjoyed exploring it and seeing what different things we could find there. We had several new children with us today and it is amazing to see how much more confident and independent they became after just a few hours in the woods. We are looking forward to seeing how our sessions develop as we become more familiar with the new site.

We each chose a special tree in our site and gave it a name. The names we chose were Nursery, Bramble, Firework, Violet, Tractor, Baby Teddy, Florence and Lanky Larry. We will be keeping an eye on our trees as we move further into autumn and then winter so see how they change.

Woodland Playgroup Take 3

What a beautiful sunny day we had in the woods this morning! We are getting more confident in our play site now and working our way around it. Despite the sunshine there are still copious amounts of welly sucking mud to be negotiated. The burn remains a firm favourite and today’s potions included blackcurrant and orange juice, carrot soup with a parrot in it and a lovely black stone tea. We also love the tree swing and, despite it looking quite straightforward, its been interesting to see the children needing to persevere to get on to it. Of course, when they’ve expended all that effort its quite a lot to expect them to get off again so lots of patience needed for the waiting children too.

Woodland Play

We had a fantastic first morning at Woodland Play today. We are so lucky to have such a great resource on our doorsteps. As expected the burn was the biggest draw and most, if not all, of our children managed to get more than a little wet! It’s interesting to see the changes in group dynamics when you take the children into the woods and how the interaction is just subtly different. Lovely also to see so much imagination, interests, enthusiasm, cooperation, participation, team work, empathy and much much more. Roll on day 2 😊