I am pooped. Genuinely, properly, bones-tired. I don't know if it's the sheer volume of fresh air, the non-stop activities, or my brain trying to process the amount of information that's been poured into it today, but I am going to sleep extremely well tonight. The kind of sleep where you close your eyes and the next thing you know it's morning and you've not moved once.
Day one was about arriving. Day two was about doing. And there was a lot of doing.
Paul Pinecone Reporting for Duty
The morning started with a recap of yesterday - laying out a timeline on the ground and placing objects along it to represent what we'd covered. It's a lovely way to process a day. You pick up a stick or a stone or a leaf and put it down at a point on the line and say "this is when we did the knots" or "this is where we played 1-2-3". It makes the learning physical. Tangible. You can see the shape of the day laid out in front of you, which is a very different experience from reading notes off a page.
Then into name games - techniques for learning children's names, which sounds simple until you think about it properly. Remembering the names of every child in a group, quickly, reliably, in a way that makes each child feel seen and known. It matters more than you'd think.
Part of this was finding your Forest School name. Mine arrived with me years ago. I am Paul Pinecone. Ever logical - P and P, it rhymes, it's nature-based, it works. Some people had to think about theirs. Mine was just there, waiting. I've been Paul Pinecone in Sarah's world for long enough that it's just part of who I am.
Knives, and My Happy Place
Straight into a new knot - the tripod lashing, which is a staple of Scouting and one I could do with my eyes closed. Then on to tool use. And this is where I properly lit up.
First up: knives.
I'll be honest with you. Hand me a knife and a piece of wood and I'm content. I whittle spoons. I make all kinds of contraptions. It's the thing I do when I need to not be looking at a screen, and it's the thing I've been doing at Sarah's Forest School sessions for years. So the knife work itself wasn't new territory.
But here's the thing though - the course isn't just about knowing how to use a knife. It's about knowing how to teach knife use. How to describe what you're doing. How to move with a knife safely. How to pass one to someone. How to store them. The pedagogy of tool use, not just the practice. There's a massive difference between being competent with a tool and being competent at teaching someone else to be competent with a tool. I know this from Cubs, and I know it from time spent at Sarah's sessions, but the course firms all of that up into something structured and deliberate.
Then the palm drill. No power here - just your palms and a drill bit, spinning it between your hands to bore a hole through wood. It's slow, it's physical, and there's something deeply satisfying about making a hole in a piece of wood using nothing but your own body and a bit of metal. Try explaining that satisfaction to someone who's never done it. I dare you.
The Tippy Tap
We disappeared off into groups with a brief: here's a milk bottle, some string, and your tools. Make a tap.
That's it. No instructions. No diagrams. No YouTube tutorial. Just materials, tools, and the implicit trust that a group of adults can figure it out. This is Forest School in action - give people the resources and the freedom, and watch what happens.
Our group came up with a tripod (thank you, tripod lashing from this morning), a foot pedal mechanism, and - the crowning glory - a soap on a rope. We were extremely proud of our tippy tap. Unreasonably proud, probably. The kind of proud where you stand back and look at it and nod slowly as if you've just built a cathedral rather than tied a milk bottle to some sticks.
The other groups' creations were all fab too - all completely different, all functional, all built with the same quiet satisfaction of people who've made something with their hands and are pleased about it.
The Roots of Forest School (Or: My Brain's Least Comfortable Hour)
After a quick tour of Sarah's emergency and safety bag - which is its own fascinating rabbit hole of preparation and contingency planning - we moved into theory. Specifically: the roots of Forest School. Where it came from. Its history and philosophical foundations.
I knew I'd be fine with knots. I knew I'd be fine with tools. But learning history and theory and then having to extract it into an on-the-spot group presentation? That is not my forte. Not even slightly. Give me a whiteboard and a software architecture diagram and I'll talk for an hour. Ask me to summarise the historical origins of an educational philosophy to a room of people I met yesterday and my brain does a very specific kind of panic.
Here's the interesting bit though. Forest School's roots are not wholly Scandinavian, which is what most people assume. I know, right? I assumed it too. Everyone assumes it's basically "the Danes let their kids play in the woods and we copied them". The reality is far more tangled and far more interesting. It's a web of influences going back centuries - you can trace threads right back to how early humans learned, more formal educational thinking from the 1800s, progressive education movements, a group of nursery nurses from Bridgwater College visiting Denmark in the early nineties and bringing something back that resonated, and all of this landing at exactly the moment when educators were growing frustrated with the National Curriculum's narrowing focus on numeracy and literacy at the expense of everything else. It drew from Scandinavia, yes, but also from a dozen other places and traditions and philosophies that all converged into something distinctly its own. I've massively oversimplified that for the sake of this not turning into a dissertation, by the way. The actual history has layers and nuance and names and dates that I'm still getting my head around. But the headline - that it's not just "a Danish thing" - stuck with me.
I'm going to need to know this in a lot more detail eventually. Our group decided to present the history back as a puppet show, which sounded like a great idea right up until I realised I was now doing a puppet show and had to articulate things that hadn't yet made it out of the panic my brain was in. The group carried it though, and we got through it.
This is where the group really showed its strength though. Split into two groups of four, we pooled what we'd read and pieced it together collectively. Nobody had the full picture on their own. Everyone had fragments. Together, it made sense. The group is genuinely supportive in a way that makes being out of your comfort zone feel survivable. I survived. Only just, but I survived.
Fire, Bread, and Silence
The afternoon brought me back to familiar ground. More tools. Fire lighting. And damper bread - the simple, beautiful act of wrapping dough around a stick and cooking it over a fire you built yourself.
This is my happy place. I know that with certainty now because I felt the difference between the theory session - where my brain was working overtime and my comfort zone was a distant memory - and this, where everything slowed down and settled. A small group, a fire, sticks, dough, warmth.
We sat by our fire and cooked our damper bread and shared stories. Not because anyone told us to, but because that's what happens when you put people around a fire. It's been happening for thousands of years and it turns out we haven't evolved past it. The conversation drifted in and out, and between the stories there was something I don't experience often enough: calm woodland silence. Not awkward silence. Not the silence of people who've run out of things to say. The silence of people who are comfortable enough to just be, together, in the woods, watching bread cook on sticks over flames.
I don't get that in my day job. I get Slack notifications, build pipelines, pull request reviews, and the gentle hum of anxiety that comes with running multiple SaaS products. This was the opposite of all of that. This was slow, and warm, and completely analogue.
One More Day
Tomorrow is day three. The last of this first block of woodland training, though the course stretches out over a year ahead of me. I'm exhausted in the best possible way - the kind of tired that comes from using your body and your brain and your hands all day, rather than just your eyes and your fingertips.
My comfort zone has been thoroughly exceeded in some areas and deeply confirmed in others. I can tie knots and light fires and whittle things. I cannot yet do an impromptu presentation on the historical roots of an educational movement without my palms sweating. But I'm getting there. The group helps. The woods help. The damper bread definitely helps.
Paul Pinecone, signing off. One more day in the woods.
