Get Out More
Get more out of lifeVisit the new website
Get Out More’s new website is now live and this one is closing down. All the information, photos etc has now moved to our new address www.getoutmorecic.co.uk. The new site, which has been designed and developed by the fantastic Design by If has lots of new features including an events calendar, case studies, feedback and downloadable booking forms for forest schools etc. I’ll be continuing to blog on the new site and will upload photos from the latest projects so I hope you’ll come regularly to see what’s happening at Get Out More.
Thanks for visiting
Annie
Competitive Nature
With the Olympics about to close I’m already anticipating the gap its going to leave in my life. Normally I hardly ever watch sport, but for the last 2 weeks I have been glued to the television enjoying seeing the best of the world’s sportsmen and women compete and, like most of us, have taken huge pride in seeing how well Team GB have done. We’ve even been lucky enough to visit to the Olympic park after securing some tickets for the track cycling. (We saw Chris Hoy and Laura Trott compete in their first rounds for events they eventually won – I can honestly say it was the most exciting thing I have ever spectated!) All of this has left me examining my difficult relationship with sport.
Most of my family did well in sport, but I was the exception, proving fairly mediocre in most things I tried. I showed early promise in swimming but when it came to secondary school and having to train regularly to stay in the team, I didn’t have the committment. I quite enjoyed games, but not being gifted at hockey, tennis or netball, lessons soon became a became more endurance than enjoyment and like many teenage girls I went off participating in sport, and wasn’t above making up excuses to get out of PE. Then some enlightened teacher invited a few of us to go rock climbing and suddenly I realised you don’t have to compete against other people to enjoy the thrill of and stretching your body and mind and that outdoor pursuits can be a real buzz. This opened the door to canoeing and mountain biking and these days I most enjoy hiking and wild swimming as a means to get the blood pumping and clear my mind of any stress and pressure that builds up indoors.
The much publicised London 2012 goal is to ‘inspire a generation’ and I am completely behind that idea but hope that within the drive to get children participating in sport we do not lose sight of the bigger goal; to get everyone actively enjoying physical exercise as a healthy habit for life. Not everyone can make it as the next Mo Farrah and Jessica Ennis but they shouldn’t be put off being active if they don’t have the talent to make the team. An hour in a gym would bore me to tears but I’ll walk up mountains all day for the pleasure of it. Likewise children who claim to not enjoy PE at school, run, climb and scramble around the woods for hours at forest school without even realising they’re exercising.
Competition is important; I doubt our gold medalists were inspired by the non-competitive school sports days where ‘everyone’s a winner’ but nor should any child be trying to bunk off school for their dread of coming last, as a friend of mine recently reported about her daughter who I know to be a highly adventurous and able outdoor girl. Helping children to turn their natural instincts for active outdoor play into regular enjoyable activity as they become teenagers and lifelong lifestyle habits as adults should be our ultimate goal. Yorkshire athletes did really well at the Olympics (we’d have come 11th in the medal table if we were a country!) and I’m sure our wonderful landscape has had a hand in motivating them to run, swim and cycle to greatness. The Olympics has inspired me to encourage more sedentary adults to join me in getting off the sofa and enjoy being active outdoors, rather than the face the embaressment of lyrca or the tedium of exercise machines at the gym. But right now I’m off to settle down on that sofa and watch the closing ceremony. Well done Team GB!
Beauty and the Minibeast
I don’t know when they became minibeasts. They were creepy crawlies when I was a child, then became insects or invertebrates if we wanted to be more accurate about it. But minibeasts is the term children are now taught and I like this as the catch-all term for everything from worms and snails through ladybirds and bees to spiders and centipedes. It gets you out of the messy business of having to count numbers of legs, but the term ‘mini-beast’ also makes me think of them of smaller versions of larger animals and puts me in mind of herds of woodlouse grazing dead logs like antelopes on the savannah or fierce ladybirds stalking their prey like lions, which is no bad thing. Read the rest of this entry »
Adventures in Play
What would playgrounds look like if children could build them themselves? Maybe something like The Baui, an adventure playground in Hamburg, with its huts, towers, bridges and ladders that the children had created from scratch. I’ve just got back from a study trip with Meynell Games, looking at play and playwork in Germany where I’ve been inspired by some truely great practice. At these construction playgrounds children are given wood, tools, nails and free reign to build the playspace as they chose. The concept is not unique to Germany. There is one, The Big Swing, not far from me in Eccleshill, Bradford, but its the only one I know of in West Yorkshire whereas in Hamburg and Berlin there seems to be one in every neighbourhood. Thousands of children and young people are able to spend all their free time hanging out in these freeform playgrounds that they’ve made for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »
Inspired to write
At parents’ evening last week I was flicking through my daughters’ literacy books. Story after story concerned adventures in the woods; getting lost and having to build a den to sleep out, meeting bears and other wild animals, cooking campfire teas for fairies. Some of the inspiration for this writing must have come from their experiences at forest school. Working in schools, I often hear teachers say that pupils are struggling with writing, not over pencil skills, phonics or spelling, but because they don’t know what to write about. Read the rest of this entry »
Glorious Mud
How muddy is too muddy? Forest school programmes run all year round and given our British climate we are lucky to be able to experience a wide range of weathers from hot and sunny to damp and rainy, often all in the same day. We’re outside a good chunk of the day so whatever the weather is doing, we feel it first hand and encounter its effects whether its slippy surfaces, a breezy fire or steam rising from your wellies. Last week I ran a session in the snow with some pre-school teachers and we enjoyed exploring the play possibilities it offered, such as making footprints and slides. I love the fact that the drama of the changing seasons mean that sites never look the same from one visit to the next. Read the rest of this entry »
The Sky at Night
I’ve been scanning the skies for any sign of aurora borealis, which was predicted to make a rare appearence above the UK this week. I’ve seen some amazing recent pictures taken up in Scotland. However a good helping of cloud and the ambient light pollution in our part Yorkshire are making sure the only northern light we can see is the orange glow of Bradford street lighting. This wasn’t the case when I was down in Herefordshire at the weekend. England’s least populated county has virtually no light pollution making stargazing on a clear night child’s play. Read the rest of this entry »
The Great Escape
I love Christmas, but as the big day gets nearer I start to wonder if I love the idea of it rather than the reality. Its such a busy time of year, with a month full of concerts, fairs, Christmas shopping and and trying to tie up work so you can take some time off. The joy of the season just seems to be lost when you’re stuck in a crowd at the overheated shopping centre listening to Slade on an endless loop. It would just be nice to spend some peaceful time with your family instead of rushing around ticking off lists.
We had this in mind when we proposed a family Christmas craft session in the woods. Read the rest of this entry »
Fighting Talk
Should we be encouraging children to fight? Both forest school programmes I ran this week slipped happily into war games without any injury or incident and all the kids seemed to relish the opportunity to attack, defend, chase and outwit their enemies in the course of a day playing in the woods. I never advocate people physically hurting each other, but it seems to me that the need to play war is as natural to children as den building and climbing trees and to deny them the opportunity is to deny an instinct that goes back to our evolutionary roots. Read the rest of this entry »
Staying In
I always think of autumn as a time of new beginnings. It doesn’t have the clean slate factor of 1 January or the bursting-into-new-life feel of spring, but there is something about the change of season from summer to autumn that feels like a fresh start. I suppose its all those years of going back to school in September that gets me thinking about the year ahead and significant changes in my life all happened in autumn. As this season has turned around it feels like a time of big change too. The Creative Partnerships creative learning programme I have worked on for the last 3 years has come to a close and I am now focusing all my time on developing my business, Get Out More. Up to now this has only been half of my income but now its time for the outdoor work to stand on its own two feet and be self supporting, so I’m working hard to build up my business. Great that I’ve picked the middle of an economic downturn to do this! Read the rest of this entry »
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