Wednesday 26 May 2010

A school trip, shelters and navigation

This week we had another school visit - year 5 and 6 came to learn about navigation and shelter building. Mike was able to join us too. We had a great time and the weather was perfect.

We started with some work on navigation and counting how many steps we do in 20m in order to keep track of how far we walk.

We then did some compass work in small groups, which also involved looking for their teacher!

After lunch, it was time to build shelters. We made very good use of the hazel we coppiced last winter. The children had planned some shelter types at school using art straws, so they already had some ideas.

It was fascinating to see how many different designs they came up with. All good!

Water proofing them was more difficult, but it was a good chance to get some unwanted bracken pulled up!

Yes, there are 3 girls under there!

The all important and much loved 'Water Test'!! It did end up in a big water fight.
We had a fabulous day and I think the children might have been worn out by the end of it - we were!

Tracy

2 comments:

Landrock Survival Training said...

What a fantastic day it must have been. The more people who learn these skills, the better!

Mike Pepler said...

Tracy even went through the "PLAN" survival stuff with them in the classroom a few days earlier. We had to scale back the pacing to 20m from 100m, otherwise we'd have lost them in the woods!