News & Events

Autumn 2011

 

The Red Brick Building Centre - Investingin the future of our Local Communities

 

In our Spring Newsletter 2011 we reported our investment in the Red Brick Building Centre, a project designed to bring jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities to Glastonbury as well as providing spaces and infrastructure to support the arts, community activities and training opportunities in sustainable construction and refurbishment. Ownership  of the Red Brick Building enterprise is firmly embedded in the local community by way of a Community Benefit Society.

The Red Brick Building will preserve the architectural features and layout of its industrial past. The vision is to transform the internal space to a mixture of offices, studios, workshops, meeting rooms, exhibition spaces and a cafe.  The building will be an exemplar centre of excellence for sustainable refurbishment and construction. Volunteers of the Red Brick Building Centre will play an essential role in the building work, particularly the internal fittings and the space outside the building. Volunteers will be managed by professional builders for specific building tasks. 

We hope that the children and young people of our local communities will be able to witness, document and contribute to this transformation through school visits, learning activities based at the Red Brick Building Centre, volunteering and Work Experience. We are also exploring how the centre might have a role to play in working with colleges to provide training and employment for young people in the area.

The first stage of building renovation is now well under way, with the replacement of the roof and windows and major internal refurbishment. We hope that the project will be sufficiently advanced to see the first tenants start their businesses under its roof in the late spring of 2012. 

 

Learning Outdoors - 120 Curriculum Activities for Schools

 

The book detailing our innovative work in schools, complete with lesson plans is on target to be published by autumn 2012. We are keen to emphasise that the book is not about adventurous training or 'bushcraft' but is rooted in the National Curriculum. The majority of activities in the book have been developed or refined in direct response to the curriculum demands of individual schools. 

 

Forest School. There are 30 activities in the book under the heading of 'Forest School'. These have been written in response to Forest School leaders who wish to expand their repertoire of activities and raise the bar in terms of skills and challenge. In reality, most of these activities serve the National Curriculum too. The core message remains the same. Outdoor activities can stimulate initiative, provide opportunities for innovative teaching and learning styles, teamwork and risk-taking in a way that provides a vital balance for desk based and computer based learning. 

 

 

 

 

Building a Forest School Area - Evercreech Primary School , Somerset.

In November Evercreech primary school, Somerset invited us in to create a Forest School area within the school grounds. This involved setting up a fire area complete with log seating, a work area, complete with saw horse, permanent canopy and outdoor kit racks for tools, bags and waterproofs. During the course of the two days we were working at Evercreech, every child in the school working with us for at least an hour and made a valuable contribution. There was a great deal of digging, sawing, joint cutting, construction and knot tying to be done. We were supported not only by the excellent staff at the school but also by wonderful parent volunteers. It really felt like a great community effort. The two days ended with a ceremonial lighting of the first campfire and the whole school coming out to enjoy  their new learning environment.

 

 

 

Ansford Academy - Environmental Day - A report.

Ansford Academy invited us in during November to work with their Year 8 students as part of their Environmental Day. This was a useful opportunity for us to try out a couple of the new activities in our 'Learning Outdoors' repertoire. We took 'low-impact, indigenous technologies' as our theme. The first, and probably most popular, was 'Travois Races'. This activity involves two teams constructing a Native American sled out of hazel poles, capable of carrying one of the students. The groups are given 25 minutes to complete their travois and the two teams then race each other across the field, pulling their travois with a student on board.

We were extremely impressed with the ingenuity of the students in coming up with a range of construction methods, based on the photographs we provided of travois being used by Native Americans in 19th century contexts. We were careful not to provide anything resembling a plan, in order to make problem-solving a core theme of the activity.

Our second new activity was shaduf making. A shaduf is an ancient Egyptian method of raising water that uses a lever and counterbalance to raise a bucket of water. In building half-scale working models to raise 2.5 litres of water, students get a great opportunity to look at levers in action. A correctly counter-balanced shaduf involves pulling the bucket down towards the water supply and the counterweight being sufficient to raise the water with no effort on the part of the operator other than controlling the speed of lift.

Teams are given hazel poles, string, rubber buckets, a sandbag with sand and 25 minutes to make a working shaduf. Once again, we were very impressed with the ingenuity and problem-solving abilities of Ansford's students.

Vying for first place in popularity was rope bridge building. This is one of our well-established activities and remains one of the most challenging. The high levels of tension needed on the ropes, as well as their careful positioning and tieing off makes this an activity difficult to get right without some adult intervention. Nonetheless, the majority of rope bridges were completed to time and survived the test - the group crossing the bridge without significant loss of tension. Again, bridge building serves the curriculum well in terms of developing understanding of how the load applied to a bridge is distributed and finally transferred to ground anchors .

top