Our aim at Forest School this week was to experience what it was like to be living in more primitive times, as we begin our topic on Medieval Life. Although the ember bowls have a more primitive history, we talked through what it would be like to be living more hand to mouth and how many more people during medieval times would have been farmers or certainly spent time working off the land.

We had to saw our own fairly flat ‘wood cookies’ and then use carefully blown embers to burn out a hollow in the wood. The children learnt patience in their sawing and blowing and had to take care and risk assess when using the embers. A few children experimented in making small hand-drilled holes in the wood and this helped considerably in getting started (though discussion over whether it was ‘fair’ also ensued).