GREENWAYS
FOREST SCHOOL
BACK INTO NATURE!
Getting your children
What We Do
Greenways Forest School, in Hackney, provides a huge range of outdoor experiences and adventures for your children to enjoy.
We run sessions every Saturday morning from 10am - 12pm in Haggerston Park, and Wick Woodland, as well as a full week of sessions during school holidays. We also do forest school birthday parties!
By following child-led learning journeys and setting realistic but challenging tasks or activities, our team will help the children gain a greater self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-belief.
Carefully tailored activities like science experiments, bushcraft, and games, will help the children learn more about the world around us and about ourselves, and help their brains develop holistically.
Our highly experienced team will follow the children on their individual learning journeys, helping them to build upon the skills they learn each week. We also run birthday parties and school holiday camps!
Greenway Forest School Hackney is open to all – schools, settings, families, childminders and organisations.
Our aim is to spread the good practice and ethos of Forest School across Hackney and beyond.
We learn to care for the creatures
we are sharing the space with by building bug hotels, bird feeders, and nests.
We learn about the trees that live in the forest by making woodland crowns, leaf art, and nature trails.
If we need to put up a shelter, the children will learn how to: source the equipment, tie the required
knots, keep the shelter tight,
safely use tools to make pegs from sticks, and to work as a team.
We create masterpieces by making paintbrushes using the woodland materials around us, making mud faces, and leaf printing.
Greenways Forest School's mission is to get London’s children back into nature. We want to help them connect with the forest spaces we have on our doorstep. We've been working with children of all ages across London for over 10 years and are always in awe of the transformative power of nature and how it can help children's confidence, self-esteem, and self-belief grow.
The sessions teach children to be confident, imaginative, and independent learners - all while having lots of muddy fun in the forest! Each week the children will build on the skills they have learnt in previous weeks, explore their senses and their surrounding environment, and build up gross and fine motor skills through the range of activities and adventures that Greenways Forest School in Hackney has to offer.
What Is
Forest School?
Forest School is a child-centred inspirational learning process, that offers opportunities for holistic growth through regular sessions. It is a long-term program that supports play, exploration and supported risk taking. It develops confidence and self-esteem through learner inspired, hands-on experiences in a natural setting.
Forest School has a developmental ethos shared by thousands of trained practitioners around the world, who are constantly developing their learning styles and skills to support new and imaginative learners. Its roots reach back to the open-air culture, friluftsliv, or free air life, seen as a way of life in Scandinavia where Forest School began. It arrived in the UK in 1993 and has grown from strength to strength since then.
The process helps and facilitates more than knowledge-gathering, it helps learners develop socially, emotionally, spiritually, physically and intellectually. It creates a safe, non-judgemental nurturing environment for learners to try stuff out and take risks.
Forest School inspires a deep and meaningful connection to the world and an understanding of how a learner fits within it. Our approach to risk means that learners constantly expand on their abilities by solving real-world issues, building self-belief and resilience. We believe that risk is more than just potential for physical harm, but a more holistic thing, there are risks in everything we do, and we grow by overcoming them. Forest School therefore, helps participants to become, healthy, resilient, creative and independent learners.
There is lots of research out there to support the outcomes of Forest School, but we know that it isn’t just the educational outcomes and research that matter, our learners and leaders love it too!
You can book sessions here. And don't forget, if it's your child's first session
we have a special Taster Session discount!