Forest school cooking activities

Running cooking activities well

Campfire cooking is the pay-off for everything else — the fire that got lit, the wood that got gathered, the waiting. It's also the most reliably inclusive thing you can offer. A child who won't climb, won't get muddy and won't talk will still eat a hot roll they cooked themselves.

Keep it simple and let it take a long time. Dough on a stick that takes forty minutes and comes out slightly raw in the middle beats anything a leader produced from a cool bag. And eating together at the end, sitting round the embers, does more for a group than any circle time you could design for them.

• Allergies and dietary needs come off the register, never out of memory. Check them the morning of, every time.
• One pair of hands per cooking station. Reaching across a fire is where the burns come from.
• Under-cooked is fine for dough and not for eggs or meat. Choose recipes that fail safely.
• Foraged ingredients need a confident identifier, a clean site, and families who know in advance.