Forest school games

Running games well

A game at the start settles a group and a game at the end sends them home high. Woodland games use the site itself — the trees to hide behind, the slope to run down, the dark corner nobody has been into yet — so they double as how children learn where they are.

Not every game needs a winner. The stalking games, the listening games, the ones where the whole group has to move without being heard, do more for a group than anything competitive. And a game a child invents and the group adopts is worth ten off a list.

• Set the boundary — a named tree, a path, a fence line — and walk it before you play, not during.
• Keep two or three games you can start in eight seconds, for the moment a session goes flat.
• Watch the running surface. Roots, slope, brambles and a wet December change what you can safely play.
• Let them change the rules. A game the group has rewritten is a game the group owns.