Today was another beautiful day and we have been blessed by the weather being sunny and fairly mild. Today was an extra catch up ,which was not planned, and we made the most of it and it turned out to be a very enjoyable and meaningful learning experience.
The class will be reciting’ One dark night’ by Richard Edwards at the Moray Music festival and in class we are looking at poems and poetry. We have been reading Edwards Lear’s ‘ The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’ and we discussed the poem in a forest setting i.e. crumpetty trees and heard a full reading. We all recited ‘One Dark Night’ and discussed how we are going to recite it i.e. specific parts, emphasis and rhythm. The forest school ended with a reading of Lear’s ‘ The Owl and the Pussycat’.
Interspersed within the poetry the two groups, the wolves and the bears, were asked to make up a ‘wide game’, with their own rules which they then had to tell the other pupils about. These games , ‘Forest maniacs ‘ and ‘ Running forest’ were delivered a couple of times and refined.
Personal reflection and Evaluation.
it was really good to have work to follow on from class work. The pupils were really involved with the poetry session in the classroom the previous day and it was delightful to carry it into the forest. Edward Lear’s poems lend themselves to the outdoors and it was truly moving to recite them in a sunlit, bird singing forest. The pupils were enthralled with the poems and the discussion around our choric verse recitation was extremely valuable and productive, all done sitting round a fire.
The communication skills developed between the pupils in their groups while forming their wide game was wonderful to see and listen to, but it was the ownership of the rules and the modification steps taken that really was great to see . personalisation and choice? lots of!