Music, Yoga and Forest School
St George’s offers free Music, Yoga and Forest School sessions to all nursery and pre-school children!
Every week, Tatty Bumpkin visits St George’s to take the children on her Bendy, Giggly yoga adventures!
The sessions use a combination of storytelling, multi-sensory props, music and children’s yoga postures to ignite the children’s imagination to encourage movement and enhance their development. The progressive programme is fully aligned to the EYFS curriculum, and has been developed by paediatric physiotherapists, yoga teachers, musicians and educationalists, so whilst the children are having fun, you can rest assured that their development is also of key importance.
The children’s essential creative pathways connect while valuable life skills are learnt – fine-motor to help with handwriting, communication to aid social skills, crossing the midline to help with dressing themselves and eating, core muscle strength to enable sitting still, mindfulness and relaxation to help with self-regulation and listening. All whilst they are diving into the ocean with Dolphin, or zooming into space in their rockets, or creeping through the jungle in the search for Lion!
For further information, please click HERE to visit the Children Inspired by Yoga website.
Musical Bumps teachers – in partnership with Music for Starters Ltd – offer a full programme of classes for schools and nurseries. From the early months right through to the end of Key Stage 1, you can be confident that your children will grow and learn through their music-making!
Real Music… key musical skills and concepts are learnt and practised
Real Education… activities support all areas of the curriculum
Real Fun… exciting puppets and percussion at every session
Their carefully prepared curriculum is based on the Kodaly principles of early childhood music education and offers separate age-specific sessions to allow progression.
It’s not just the children who will learn – this is an excellent opportunity for staff in schools and nurseries to learn new skills and gain new ideas!
Musical Bumps teachers are trained by an expert team; they are experienced musicians and Early Years practitioners and receive extensive, ongoing training. All teachers have an enhanced disclosure certificate.
Here is their website for more details.
Forest School sessions
St George’s offers a Forest School session to preschool groups on Friday afternoon with Lisa Cobb.
Lisa has been working in a Forest school setting for over 6 years. She has 2 children, a dog called Stella and a very old goldfish called Henry.
Forest School is an inspirational learning process that originated in Scandinavia. The ethos of Forest School is to allow children the time and space to develop skills, interest and understanding through a range of activities which provide practical, hands-on experiences in a natural environment. Children will be able to take ownership of their own learning by making decisions, taking risk in a safe environment and learning new skills. Forest School helps to develop self-awareness and responsibility towards others and the wider world.
Each session is structured but the children also have time to use their imagination and do what they want, whether it be playing in the mud kitchen, watering the allotment area or painting a fence…..
The structure of each session will depend on the chosen activity for the week. For example, in our first session we made bug hotels and the children were very excited to find out what bugs and creatures they will discover living there over the next few weeks. Lisa showed them images of insects that they might find. She chatted to the children about what we can and can’t do when the fire is lit and embedded the fire circle rules by asking the children lots of questions about how to be safe near a fire. We then toasted marshmallows and the children loved them. The session ended with a story, and I asked the children what they have enjoyed most about Forest School that day.
