St Clements Wood Project

St Clements has developed a link with Evanton woods, a local wood which has recently been bought by the community. Their education officer Simon Harry has been very keen for local schools to use the wood for learning and particularly keen for us as an SEN school to be involved in the developement of facilities for able and disabled users. We have had input into designing access paths, areas to develop which our pupils would benefit from and also signage that is appropriate for our pupils.A project which we completed last week was designing and making a seating area in the wood. Over a period of time a group of our pupils looked at various types of woodland seating, considering which would be the easiest for them to make and need minimum maintenance. Having decided on a type, a tree trunk cut into logs, using a standard seat as a base measurement they used strips of paper to make some seats higher and lower .....thus having seats that could also be used as stepping stones! Their idea. They also needed to consider how to secure them, so they decided to dig a hole and by adding a third onto the seat measurement ...this was considered to be sufficient depth for their hole. Each child was to make two seats. In school while developing the idea, we used coloured circles to designate the logs and place them a stride apart to see how the plan would work, before we went to the wood.