What do you mean we’ve only got 3 months left?
Yep, it’s true, we’re into October already. What’s worse is that shops are selling Christmas stuff!!!
Anyway… Summer has been and gone and we’re now smack bang into a full blown Autumn. Snow is even appearing on the hills up here. That might be the reason folks are wanting to curl up by their fires rather than venture out for some fun in the forest.
The past wee while has been quite busy, so busy i didn’t even realise it was so busy because there was no time to take it all in. I mist admit there has been a lot of personal development over the past month, but it wont be long before I will be sharing my new found knowledge with others. Training has included: Learning about fungi, surveying invertebrates, learning about beetles, introduction to lichens, starting a botanical illustration class and partaking in strengthening communities training.
I joined The Highland Council Countryside Rangers for a training day in Fort Augustus where The Great Glen Way Rangers (Like a Power Ranger show down) showed us some of their equipment they use with groups. They have kelly kettles, a fire pit and some awesome homemade green wood working equipment including a shave horse and treadle powered woodworking lathe.
I also completed the second part of Forest Schools training. Learning about lesson planing, risk assessing, more green wood working, spoon making, leaf printing, and natural craft making.
It’s all sounding a bit selfish on the self-learning side of it but I have been giving stuff back, I promise. 🙂
Gergask Primary’s after school club “Mini Scientists” is up and running. We have been looking at weather and delving into clouds quite literally, by making a cloud in a bottle, recreating clouds with shaving foam to learn all the different formations and making shaving foam clouds rain blue dye. Next after the holidays we will carry out some Opal climate change surveys and maybe start looking at trees.
I’ve been helping out with some younger groups as well. I took the Newtonmore under 5s group for a walk round Loch Imrich, where we found spiders, collected all the colours of leaves, made pictures of ourselves out of natural things we could find and finally made a rainbow with all the different coloured leaves.
I have also been down to see what the Kincraig under 5s get up to. They run a nursery where they have designated outdoor days. I hope to be catching up with them after the holidays to see what they get up to outdoors.
If that wasn’t enough… The Highland Council Countryside Rangers have been running events for the Highland Archaeology Festival. I have been lucky enough to assist with a walk up to Dun da-Lamh fort in Laggan and also be Indiana Bones’ archaeological assistant (complete with cringe worthy am-dram) at a Clava Cairns event. Both events captured the imagination and encouraged the participants to travel back in time and to relive and speculate on events that happened at these sites.
Onward! Running an October holiday nature club this week. It’s hard to drag the bairns oot their beds over the holidays especially when its this chilly….
