Continue reading It’s nesting season and we’re looking out for blackbirds!
Tag: Outdoor Education
Easter Activity from The Children’s Forest – natural egg dyeing
The egg, so fragile and yet so strong, with its promise of new life, has always been a potent symbol and a part of Easter celebrations. In this extract from The Children’s Forest we show you how to paint eggs using natural dye, leaves and flowers.
Continue reading Easter Activity from The Children’s Forest – natural egg dyeingHome learning through lockdown
As 2021 begins we find ourselves back in lockdown, and looking for inspiring activities and home learning aids.
Hawthorn Press has practical books that can help with home education such as educational text books, crafts, seasonal projects, storytelling and literacy.
Pandemic Homeschooling
The Case for Homeschooling: free range home education handbook by Anna Dusseau is full of useful tips and advice on how to help your children learn at home. From a chapter on pandemic homeschooling, discussing how to juggle home learning with work and with tips to get you started, to 101 Activity Ideas, a Q&A section and suggested further reading and resources.
Early learning and movement?
Sally Goddard Blythe offers stories, songs with 2 CD’s, rhymes and exercises for early years brain development, attention, co-ordination and balance in Movement, your child’s first language.
Learning to write and read?
Parents of children aged 6-8 years will find Writing to Reading the Steiner Waldorf Way a creative, fun way of introducing literacy, from drawing the letters, to movement, telling stories to then writing and reading. Creative Form Drawing For the Four Temperaments with Children aged 6-10 years offers colourful pre-writing exercises.
Every family is a storytelling family and every child a storyteller?
Interested in telling nature stories? Then The Natural Storyteller has stories for telling orally. Using the story maps, you can easily tell the stories without reading and become a family storyteller. You can build up a repertoire of stories to tell your family, and impress your teachers on returning to school. You can find world stories in 147 Traditional Stories, for children aged 7-12 to retell, and storytelling tips.
Seasonal Nature and Craft
Books such as The Children’s Forest offer stories and songs, wild food, recipes, crafts and celebrations for all the year round. Families can enjoy these, with seasonal things to look out for on your daily walks.
Crafting is a great way to spend time with your family, or to lose yourself in to counter feelings of anxiety or loneliness. Making with your hands is a great way of giving children the creative life skills for navigating this age of disruption. We have a wide variety of books including Making Soft Dolls, Making the Children’s Year, Making Simple Needle Felts and Making Peg Dolls.
Our own Katy Bevan co-hosts a visible mending workshop, Meet Make Mend that you can now join online. The group will next meet on 13th January from 7 p.m. – sign up here.
There are also countless online tutorials springing up where you can join like-minded folk and make things together. For example, Hikaru Noguchi, author of Darning: Repair, Make, Mend is currently offering visible mending tutorials on IGTV and Steffi Stern, author of several crafting books published by Hawthorn Press, has a selection of online workshops available to watch via Youtube.
You can keep up-to-date on Hawthorn Press books, events and activity suggestions by following us on social media and by signing up to our monthly newsletter.
’tis the season to be crafting
As we spend more time at home again, make the most of chilly days and early evenings by taking up a new craft project.
Darn it! As discussed in a recent article by Rosanna Dodds, visible mending is about more than thrift – it is a process by which we can save favourite garments and make them unique to us. It is also a craft that can fit into the time you have available. As Hikaru Noguchi, author of Darning: Repair, Make, Mend says,
“Most projects are finished within a few minutes to an hour. There’s no need to take out a sewing machine; the tools are as simple as a darning mushroom, needle and scissors. You can darn just as quickly as sewing on a button. If you’re set on darning a larger area, you can continue to enjoy the pleasures of sewing and working methodically, giving you a great sense of satisfaction in a job well done.”
Whether you are new to darning, or already an enthusiast, join us for a new season of Meet Make Mend with Katy Bevan and Kath Child from Atelier Stroud. The mending and darning circle meets on the first Wednesday of each month, starting on Wednesday 4th November at 7 p.m. Register here to join us online.
If you prefer to make rather than mend, then one of our many craft titles could inspire you, from needle felts to knitted animals and soft dolls. For online guidance author Steffi Stern runs a number of YouTube tutorials, which you can follow in your own time. These include a soft dolls workshop, with accompanying materials kit that can be bought from Steffi’s shop, The Makerss. You can also find more craft ideas on our YouTube channel.
Steffi is running a brand new workshop on Sunday 8th November at 11 a.m. celebrating winter with a hands-on robin masterclass.
Throughout November Steffi will also be running workshops on making nativity figures, from her book Making Simple Needle Felts. Watch live or catch up on YouTube.
For more seasonal crafts, both indoor and outdoor-based, The Children’s Forest, Findus, Food and Fun and Making the Children’s Year all have a variety of activities that are fun and educational.
Many of us may find this winter more challenging than usual. We hope that by immersing ourselves in the fun of crafting, we can make the most of this unusual time.
We’d love to see the results of your projects! Do share pictures of them on our social media – Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. We look forward to it!
Making An Edible Mandala
Today is Halloween, the origins of which date back to the Celtic tradition of Samhain. It is a potent time of year – celebrating both death, with a celebration of our ancestors, and life. Many cultures honour their dead at Samhain, a tradition that gave way to Halloween, or All Hallows Eve.
The other side of death is birth. Dead leaves fall from the trees, but they nourish the earth, supporting new life. Recognising that Samhain is a time not just of death, but of rebirth, Celtic peoples celebrated Samhain as the Celtic New Year.
Following this guide from The Children’s Forest by Dawn Casey, Anna Richardson and Helen D’Ascoli, why not create an edible mandala this Halloween, using the autumn’s harvest.
This activity is taken from The Children’s Forest: Stories & songs, wild food, crafts and celebrations by Dawn Casey, Anna Richardson and Helen D’Ascoli. Find out more about the book on the Hawthorn Press website.