This book immediately stood out to me because we were moving out to some property with quite a bit of acreage and trees. Also, my husband and I are very outdoorsy and want to encourage our boys to be too. I couldn't help but think it would be the perfect tool for encouraging my sons to learn more about our surroundings! This book is geared towards all children, whether they are active and outgoing or a little more shy. Another thing that I absolutely loved was how the book was divided into seasons. In Washington, we have pretty defined seasons (mostly) and I knew that I could take full advantage of each section. There are craft activities, food activities, and so much more! Not to mention, part of the activities called for a larger group which was perfect for our group of friends and their children. I believe the only "downside" was some of the more advanced terminology but a quick web search helped fix that!

Overall, this book was quite a gem. My son has learned so much and so have I! Plus, it has given us so much more to do outside other than what we normally go out and do.

Great book, works well as companion to Foraging With Kids. Lots of local interest in nature and foraging.

In a time when many children are just gazing at screens, this book is a great introduction to be outside. This book is loaded with cool ideas for introducing children to the outdoors. It's well written and the project directions were very clear. It is a great book for parents to use on a weekend getaway and a good companion book for Scout troop leaders.

This is a great read for parents, scout leaders and outdoor enthusiasts who want to help children thrive in outdoor experiences.

Forest schools are gaining momentum in the United States. This is a much needed resource for patrons planning on exposing their young ones to the outdoors. The topics were varied and suitable for urban, suburban, and rural living areas making this reachable to all caregivers of youth no matter where they reside.

I loved the suggestions and tips for interacting with nature and how to engage children to explore without having to provide too much direction.

I've always thought sending my son to a Forest School would be wonderful but unfortunately we don't live an area that is accessible to one. We're outdoorsy people as it is and so I do tend to teach him what I can but there were some wonderful ideas for guided and unguided ideas for forest school educational experiences. While this had references to plants that don't occur in my region, you can easily adapt this to wherever you live. I enjoyed the book and got some great ideas to incorporate with my son at home as he gets older!

This is a great resource book, both for parents and education professionals who may be working in, or looking to set up a forest school setting. As a parent, it's brilliant as everything is explained clearly and the illustrations are lovely.

The activities and tasks within the book are at different levels, and suitable for different age groups, but none of them are too basic. This is great, as it pushes you to go beyond the usual garden type activities, and really embrace something more challenging in the forest. There are some items where additional tools are required, but these are nothing out of the ordinary or too expensive.

I will definitely be returning to this book for inspiration throughout the seasons.

I have been hearing about these schools for years. I even used some of their ideas with my own child while she was growing up! This book is loaded with cool ideas for introducing your child (of children) to the outdoors. I taught my Girl Scouts a bit of outdoor craft when we camped on long weekends. I thought it was useful for them to know some foraging skills, fire building, solar ovens, etc... This book is a good intro to the schools and their philosophy. It's well written and the directions for projects, I thought, were pretty clear. Some of these might be incorporated into an everyday classroom, Scout and other camp troops might find it useful, as might parents.

A wonderful books full of ideas for experiencing the outdoor.
Strongly recommended.
Many thanks to Watkins and Netgalley for the ARC

This book is broken up by season. For each season there are a handful of activities as well as a day planned to celebrate the season (the day contains several activities). I have mixed feelings about the book.

On the one hand, the activities are well described. Each activity that occurs outside of a season day is highlighted in a bulleted list. This organization makes it easy to determine if your children could participate in that activity based on the number of children and age, etc.

On the other hand, most of the activities didn't interest me and several of them required actual woods and wouldn't do even in my more naturey than usual backyard. The activities seem consistent with those I've found in other Forest School books so if you've like other Forest School books you'll probably love this one.

All in all I'd say this is an excellent book, but only for people who like the activities.

This book was a joy to read. It had lots of wonderful ideas to take straight from the book to the classroom and has given me more inspiration to take learning outside.

Forest schools and other outdoor learning environments are becoming increasingly popular, not just in the United Kingdom but in the U.S. and around the world. A Year of Forest School: Outdoor Play and Skill-building Fun for Every Season, by Jane Worrell and Peter Houghton, gives parents and teachers ideas for nearly 40 seasonal activities suitable for forest schools, homeschools or other learning environments.

The book features about 10 activities each for each of the four seasons. Some are games, others crafts, and some are skills like fire building or carving. They are designed to be used for children roughly age 3 or 4 through 12 or so, though the ages are rather subjective.

As an example, the activities for spring (from the table of contents) are:

Make nettle soup (from foraged stinging nettles)
Make a “wood cookie man” (slices of logs assembled into a doll)
Make bramble cordage (make twine from the inner fibers of raspberry or blackberry stalks)
Play “mammoth, hunter, mouse”
Make a sistrum (musical tool) from wood
Make a mud birthday cake for the Earth
Have an “egg hunt” (look for golden tickets together to redeem for a chocolate egg)
Do clay art a year of forest school
Make dandelion lime tea

Summer includes activities like making a bark mask and making ink from crushed berries and cutting a goose feather into a quill to write with it.

Autumn includes activities like making an evergreen paintbrush or baking apples on a fire.

Winter includes activities like doing a compass treasure hunt and making charcoal pencils.

The paperback version of the book is filled with some sketch drawings of the activities. It is printed in dark gray with green accents.
There were things I really liked about the book, with some caveats.

Pros:

Children are trusted to learn skills like foraging, wood carving and fire making from a young age, and given very clear safety instructions on how to do this safely.
The activities are designed to work with various ages and abilities.
The activities are designed to encourage cooperation and teamwork, not competition.
Kids learn about great skills
It encourages kids to spend a great deal of time outside in all kinds of weather
There are lots of fun projects and some fun games
As an avid forager, I love any book that encourages teaching children to gather wild foods
Not much is needed for outside equipment or supplies
The book is generally fun and encourages a love of the outdoors

Cons:

There were times when I didn’t understand terminology used. For instance, a lot of the projects call for “secateurs” and I am guessing those are like garden clippers but I really have no idea.
There sometimes weren’t enough drawings or instructions for me to understand complicated directions. For instance, I found the cordage activity very confusing in terms of how the author said to weave the fibers. Our family has made cordage from other plant fibers but not in the way they instruct, and I ended up very confused by what she meant.
Most of the games involve fairly large groups, so they are not likely to work in individual homeschool families.
The book was written in the UK and some of the trees, foraged foods and such will not be available in other regions. Of course, you should be able to find suitable substitutes.
I was able to preview two versions of this book — one was a temporary PDF sort of look at the print version and the other was a digital download via Kindle. The Kindle version had no illustrations. I don’t know if this was just for the review version or if it will not have any if you purchase it via Kindle. It would be really hard to understand many of the projects without at least simple illustrations. The Kindle page on Amazon just shows the print excerpts, so I’m not sure I’d recommend this book in Kindle format unless you can preview it somehow and be sure you’ll get a version where you can see some of the illustrations.

Also, this is a silly quibble, but the game “Mammoth, Hunter, Mouse” instructed kids to pretend to use a bow and arrow to hunt the mammoths. Actually, prehistoric hunters used atlatls (spear throwers) to hunt, since it was before the invention of the bow and arrow. Since my husband teaches atlatl making and throwing and our kids have grown up using atlatls, this was something we already knew but you can’t really fault the authors for not knowing that.

All in all, I found it to be a fun book with good information about teaching skills like fire starting and knife safety, and a nice variety of nature-related activities. It should provide some good inspiration for outdoor activities, and gives a nice look into the forest school environment. It’s priced inexpensively and would make a good addition to a homeschool or school library.

A sort of handbook of activities to do in the woods/forest, in every season, with every weather and with kids of every ages. I would have loved to have a book like this when I was a boy scout!

Una specie di manuale che raccoglie ogni possibile attivitá da fare nei boschi con ogni tempo, in ogni stagione e con i bambini di tutte le etá. Mi sarebbe piaciuto avere a disposizione un libro del genere quando ero un boy scout!

THANKS NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

I chose this book because my son had attended a ‘forest school’ with his class and, in typical 11-year-old style, told me virtually nothing about it. I thought this would be a way of encouraging him to talk about it and give us some ideas we could try at weekends.
Early in the book was a paragraph on ‘how to use a sheath knife’. ‘Did you use a knife at forest school???’ ‘Oh yeah.’ Images of son’s friends running round the woods brandishing knives….
The book is divided into the four seasons and gives clear details of activities to do in those seasons, such as building shelters, making a walking stick and using feather pens with blackberry ink. There are plans for a whole day of activities in each season. I particularly liked the food and drink based activities (nettle soup, baked apples) and there are some lovely games.
This book isn’t really aimed at parents but at schools, clubs and playgroups. (One of the games needed eight plus players!) I think they will find it useful for outdoors ideas and appreciate the notes on how to support shy or nervous children. However, for the non-experts using this book, pictures and diagrams would be useful .I’d never heard of a sistrum before and I had to google it to find out what one looks like.
Overall I enjoyed this book. It’s given me some ideas for (slightly toned down) outdoor activities and if I ever start my own playgroup, this will definitely be on my bookshelf!
Thanks to Net Galley and Watkins Publishing for this review copy.

This is a fantastic book that concentrates on getting kids outdoors, having fun and forging connections with the natural world while learning new practical skills. The book is divided into seasons and suggests appropriate activities. The activities are fully explained with lists of equipment needed but they can be adapted to match your resources. My favourite is making a birthday cake for Earth - out of mud of course! It reads beautifully as well - the writer's love for the natural world is evident. It is a great resource - anything that encourages children to get messy, to engage their imaginations and to find joy and wonder in the world around them in these days of mobile phones and Netflix should be lauded.