Saturday 2nd June 2012

Elder Pens

Last week, tired after teaching all day, I dragged myself to St Joseph's In the Park, Hertingfordbury, for a forest school practitioner cluster meeting.  So pleased I did.  It is always good to come face to face with other people who share a passion for teaching outside (often find ourselves sharing our ideas for teaching inside too - always inspiring to chat to like minded teachers).

We learned from Ray Banks how to make elder pens and from Chris Brunton some great shelter building tips and ideas for using a tarpaulin.  It was also good to spend time in such a nice, old wood with a perfect mix of wilderness and tamed areas.

Inspired by Ray's pens, I showed my current Year 4 class at St Chris how to make them and they took off with the idea.  We found that beach nut husks make excellent lids for the pens.

This is what we used to make ours:

thin branches of elder cut to size
the insides of cheap biros
thin rods to remove the pithy middle (ours were kite sticks chopped up)
peeler
double sided tape
embroidery cottons
feathers
found materials from outside (grass, leaves, petals etc)
felt pens for writing names

I showed the children how to hollow out the sticks and insert the biro and then I demonstrated a few ideas for how they could decorate the pens.  Showed them that you could slice a tiny bit of bark off to reveal a bit of white to write a name.  Showed how to use strips of double sided tape to make the cottons adhere more easily and stick leaves, feathers, grass.

This was a great session because the task was simple enough for everybody to complete the whole thing independently (although some children needed a little help removing the double sided tape backing paper). The children were motivated throughout - it provided lots of opportunity for chatting about colour choices, how their pen would feel when writing, where they would hold it, whether it was good to use all natural materials, whether they wanted any of the elder bark to show through.  When the children had finished they wrote or drew pictures with their pens and decorated their work with found materials.