A slightly soggy winter

After that lovely autumn we had, the weather has been a bit more challenging for the last month or so, but we have still had some nice Thursday mornings in West Bank Park, for example:

* Water-painting - an old favourite this. All you need is paintbrushes and pots of transparent 'magic paint' from your tap. You can paint tree trunks and they go a lovely dark colour. However, the cold drove us home early, and drove me to send out a reminder to everyone to wear twice as much clothing as they think necessary for our meetings over the winter!

* Moon and star mobiles: Take a long stick, some cardboard cut-out moons and stars, some used tin foil in silver and gold, and some bits of wool. Wrap the moons and stars in foil and hang them from the stick, along with pine cones etc if you like. It makes a lovely backdrop for a story, especially if hung in a tree.

* Advent wands: practically a tradition with us now in early December. We gathered long, stout sticks and lots of greenery (holly, bay, pine, etc) to twine around them. Tied it up with colourful pipe cleaners and ribbons. They do look lovely, and featured in a story about Santa Claus using his magic wand to cast a spell on poor old Granny's Christmas tree, with the help of some spiders, to make it sparkle with the very first tinsel.

* This week is our Christmas party. Another 'tradition' is to decorate a tree in the woods and sing carols to it. After doing that, we'll head over to Holgate Methodist Church and its nice warm hall, for some crafts and party food.

From mosaics to windmills

Another very lively few weeks for our group. We've had:

* a trip to Holgate Windmill with the wonderful Jen Hay. She gave us all a try at grinding corn with a pair of stones, then with a quern (that was a real technological innovation, let me tell you!), and then we looked at how the windmill works. She told us the story of 'The Mill That George Built', complete with some impressive props, and the children coloured in some pictures of the windmill in bright colours. We sponsored one panel of the new sails, and have a smart certificate to say so! (unfortunately we also caused a minor breakage - the perils of toddlers!)

* leaf printing - thanks Nikki Humberstone and Janey Stockdale for organising this. The children really enjoyed making lovely, overlapping artworks in different colours of paints, using different kinds of leaves. Activities like this can get them in quite a dreamy state, which is to be treasured.

* bird feeder making, using pine cones, sticky 'orrible lard and seeds. There were not many children this week, but sometimes that can make for an unexpectedly fun morning, as happened on this occasion. They led us a merry dance round the woods, jumping up and down slopes covered in fallen leaves.

* More Magical Mosaics! - the splendid Mary Passeri came back for a final fling with us, and we made secret hidden mosaics in the woods. The children's enthusiasm and attention span for this was really wonderful to see. It being half term, we had some robust 4, 5 and 6-year-olds to help out. They especially enjoyed hammering old tiles to smithereens through an old blanket - as pictured. We made one final one all together in a top-secret very-well-hidden place. Mary - we will miss you!




* Planting in the wildlife area. The council has given the Friends of West Bank Park a generous budget to plant some nice-smelling, insect-attracting herbs in this area. We took part in the selection of plants, and today we got planting, with a little help from our Parks Officer Stephen Whittaker, and Margaret Weeden from the Friends. Thanks to both, as we really did enjoy this and it means a lot to the children to have contributed to making the park an even better place. They will all come back and point out which sage plants they planted, and where their snowdrops are hiding in the soil, waiting to come out after Christmas!

'Fall'-ing into bad habits...

Yes, eagle-eyed readers will observe that this is the first blog post in 7 weeks - a lot to update on! The excuse, as usual, is that we have been extremely busy in the Very Young Friends, and especially with finishing our community art project along with the Council, Pine Trees day care centre and the 'grown-up' Friends of the Park. I hope to include a picture of the finished mosaic itself, as soon as it is actually mounted in the park!

What else has the group been up to?
* A musical instrument day - making shakers using old containers and woodland treasures such as beech nuts and pine cones to fill them. Thanks Nikki for leading this session.
* A Berry Day - first we had a good look at all the different kinds of berries growing in the Park and what they are good for - from snowberries which really go 'splat' when you stamp on them, to blackberries which are delicious, to rowan berries which are magical and good for making trails, to hawthorn berries which are great for the birds but very prickly, to elderberries which make good jam, to guelder rose berries which taste disgusting, to yew berries which really ARE poisonous (all you can do with them is throw them away into the hedge very quickly). We made our own 'berries' using potatoes and colourful fleece, hid them and laid trails to them with the rowan berries.
* A Yoga Day! Laura Potts, experienced yoga teacher, led us in some Story Yoga, using positions like 'the camel', 'the tree', 'the dog', and 'the dog having a wee'. What more can I say?! We all greatly enjoyed this, appreciated the good stretch, and most of the kids even joined in!
* A Three Little Pigs Day, led by Laura Barrett, in which houses were built of straw and sticks and got blown in!
* An Apple Day - we gathered windfall apples, washed them and sliced them and hung them up to dry. A little bit challenging for our smallest members, but it's good fun to go foraging.

I am definitely missing a few here but that's enough for now!

Summer shenanigans

What have we been up to during the summer holidays? What HAVEN'T we been up to? The weather has not always been on our side, but it doesn't usually seem to matter. For me the highlight has to be today's blackberry picking and blackberry-pancake-feast, then seeing so many of the children enthusiastically participating in the story of the 'Flippy Floppy Pancake' by tearing around the clearing chasing an imaginary pancake.

But we have also made some surprisingly appealing rose petal perfume (and dabbed it behind our ears), gone digging for creepy-crawlies, begun a whole saga of stories about the hedgehog Mr Snuffles and his friends, and made soup for the fairies. On this occasion a few of the children even SAW some fairies coming out of a hole in a tree, but no adults were watching at the time.

Unfortunately my children and I missed the two late-July sessions - making extremely messy and colourful sand pictures one week, and building houses from straw, sticks and bricks (a la 3 Little Pigs) the next, I believe. Hopefully Lauras M and B can give fuller details on these in a future blog entry.

In addition to our usual Thursday meetings, the annual Play Day for children of all ages was enjoyable and well-attended. As well as helping Mary Passeri gather people's impressions of the park on clay 'maps' for the art project, we sent pairs of adults and children off on the game of 'Blind Man's Tree'. This is always a winner, no matter how cynical the adult or hyperactive the child. It goes as follows:

- the adult is blindfolded and the child leads them, by a circuitous route, to a tree of their choice in the park, trying not to let them get injured on the way!
- The adult gets to know the tree without removing their blindfold - by feeling its bark and girth, maybe taking a rubbing of it, smelling it, feeling its leaves or flowers
- The child leads the adult back to the starting point and removes the blindfold.
- The adult must then find 'their' tree. They always manage it!

Midsummer frolics

This being around the second anniversary of the Very Young Friends, we are starting to establish some traditions. So this midsummer, like last year, we went to a little grove of trees beside the grassy area of the park, which looks a bit like a campsite and has lots of hidey holes and logs to climb around. The children gathered sticks and pinecones for a midsummer 'fire', and built it up very nicely. A ring of pine cones around the outside to contain it. We positioned tea lights in it and lit them, then each child 'jumped' the fire with a bit of help: "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jumped over the candlestick" (acknowledgements to Dot Male for that idea!).

The sticks then served a different purpose, got tied together with colourful wool, flowers and other bits and bobs to make fairy webs, traps and suchlike.

We had a lovely singing session this week too. There is a very monotonous but sweet song: Zum-a-zum-a-zee, buzzy buzzy bee, Buzzing through the flowers, In the daylight hours, Zum-a-zum-a-zee..." which goes on forever and ever. All the children - even the usually shy ones - took pine cones to act as bees, and buzzed them around from flower to flower all around the little grove of trees. We sang about 10 rounds of that song and then thought it was safe to stop, when they shouted: "Keep singing!" And we had to keep going for what seemed like ages. They were in their own little world, being bees.

Working hard

Sometimes it's good to take advantage of things that are happening in the Park anyway. We heard that the Conservation Volunteers would be here this Thursday clearing and resurfacing part of the wildlife area. There is nothing little children love like watching those kind of jobs. So we went to spy on them, all 20 of them with their spades and rakes and hammers and wheelbarrows and (best of all) chainsaws. And when we'd had enough of that we went to do some chalking on the paths nearby.

It was lovely, apart from anything, to see the park so full of people - as well as us and the volunteers, there were a couple of school classes on a trip, lots of parents in the playground, council staff at work and so on.

Last week, we were also hard at work building a den in the woods. To be strictly truthful, the mums were more enthusiastic about the task than the children. But that is OK! They helped us drag big sticks over, and gave their criticisms, and pointed out when things were falling down. And, as usual, they ran away off over the root stumps and mounds by themselves.

ELDERFLOWERS

This year, like last, we set to making elderflower lemonade at the bench in front of the rockery, opposite which are some conveniently situated elder bushes. The smell is so tempting and the children's hunter-gatherer instincts come to the fore. You literally can't stop them looking for more to 'put in the basin'.

It is a good task for little children because there are several interesting stages which need lots of concentration and cooperation, and awaken all their senses:
- picking the flowerheads (about 30)
- removing the flowers from their stems
- squeeeeeeeeezing the lemons (about 4)
- adding some sugar (about 6-10 teaspoons)
- stirring in the hot water (about 2 litres)
- tapping on the pot lid to 'make the taste come out of the flowers' (not strictly necessary that one)
- having a story while waiting for it to cool down (thanks Laura for Hamda's surprise which everybody loved)
- lading the juice through a funnel into a jug
- drinking it!

This is a very approximate recipe which takes about an hour from picking to drinking. You can also make cordial (which will last a year or more) and champagne (2 weeks to turn alcoholic and drink it quick before it explodes) - look online for recipes.

The butterflies and the bees

Clare is clearly a dab hand with a hacksaw. She brought in lengths of drainpipe just right for solitary bee residences, and plenty of straws and canes to stuff them with. The children set to this task with glee. She also had them making butterfly feeders, using pieces of cotton wool dipped in sugar water to tempt them. We made a few spare to hang around the clearing in the park -let's see if they get colonised.

The worms in our plastic-jug wormery appear to be doing OK in their new home, although it is difficult to tell with worms (as Winnie the Pooh might have said). Bryony brought it in for inspection, and none of them tried to escape back to their old woodland home. The children were curious to see them. If, as planned, we do some planting this autumn in the wildlife area, it will be good to use the wormery's compost as a contribution to the bed.

May events

We have had a sometimes wet but fun month of Thursday mornings in the Park.

7th May: MAYDAY! We decked out a small tree with colourful ribbons as a Maypole, gathered armfuls of willow twigs to make crowns, and decorated them with all kinds of beautiful spring flowers. The children looked - as ever - very fetching in their crowns, and I got out my rusty tin whistle to play some jigs for them to dance round the Maypole to. It felt like we had really seen the summer in.

14th May: ARTIST DAY! Mary Passeri and Colin Widdup came to our group, as part of the ideas-gathering stage of the community mapping project. Mary had an ingenious idea,which is a bit hard to describe: first she strung a little net between two bamboo canes stuck in the ground, a bit like a mini tennis net. We gathered 'the biggest leaves in the wood' and lots of small ones and flowers too. Then, using clothes pegs, pipe cleaners, wire and leaves, we made all sorts of little creatures - butterflies, action heroes, princesses. We entangled these in the netting until it was completely covered, a bit like a mosaic really. Extra leaves in the top for battlements and feathers here and there for featheriness. It was a gorgeous thing and I hope someone has a picture of it. Mary rounded the event off with the wonderful story of 'Snotty Lottie' which I am still getting told by my kids.

21st May: WORM COMPOST DAY! Bryony and I were quite taken with the idea of having our very own Very Young Friends wormery. So she bought a clear plastic jug with a lid at St Leonard's Hospice, and made holes in the bottom. We filled it alternately with wet newspaper, sand, leaf mould and - the magic ingredient - we needed worms. Well if there is one thing we know how to do well....the kids found 30, no 40, no 50 worms with their little trowels and threw 'em in. To give them something tasty to eat we ate apples and gave them the cores. Bryony took it home for its first week, and we will all get our turns to look after the wormery. As the jug is clear, we should be able to see the worms mixing the layers and turning them into compost.

Easter Time

I'm behind schedule with this post!, but thought I would add what we got up to at Easter time. On Thursday 9th April Laura arranged an Easter Egg Hunt through the woods. The children hunted for boiled eggs in the undergrowth, then took their collection to the meadow where they decorated the eggs and made nests to put them in. Laura told a great story 'The Easter Chick' about a chick wanting to be born on Easter Sunday. We finished off with songs and a little bit of chocolate!

Thursday 16th April
In an effort to get the sun shining we decided to have sunny activities today. We started by collecting interesting leaves and feathers to make suncatchers, these were stuck down together with tissue paper and glitter to make beautiful works of art! Then we moved on to planting sunflower seeds, which is easier said than done with ten children wanting to tip out the compost and find the seed again! Hopefully we all had a sunflower seed in a pot to take home and have a sunflower making an appearance! posted by Bryony

Take a bowl of water...

Since we have been given the keys to the park store, it is much easier for us to get water whenever we want - a vital ingredient of a satisfying morning's business n the woods. A couple of weeks ago we set up washing lines between trees and spent a happy hour doing laundry. I ripped up some old blouses into small rags, sawed a block of soap into small pieces and the kids really worked very hard to get them 'clean' (well, wet and covered in soil really, but it is the thought that counts!) Pegging up is a whole other challenge. Small toddlers get on better with 'peg dolly' type pegs, older ones can manage the sprung type. Anyway - lots of fun. And the children are getting very good at a German song about washerwoman:

Sie waschen, sie waschen, sie waschen den ganzen Tag (they wash all day long)
Sie wringen,...... (they wring out)
Sie haengen.... (they hang up)
Sie tanzen..... (they dance)
Sie schlafen..... (they sleep)

This past Thursday, it was water again, this time to see if cherry blossom makes good perfume. It doesn't, really, not if you're looking for something to wear with a cocktail dress, but it is very absorbing and fun to stir!

Spring frolics in the Park

We've had a lovely few weeks (so lovely, that I haven't had time to update our blog) in the Park, marred only by the fact that the Break in the Park Cafe has now closed - we will miss all the staff and trainees almost as much as we will miss their baking and hot coffee on cold days...

On Thurs 19th March I had planned to do tree bark rubbing, and indeed we did that, for a little while.  But our nest was still there, and some spirit moved me to bring our play tent to the park as well.  The children decided to set it up on the nest itself, and they 'built a fire' among the felled stumps and logs beside it.  We (parents) were getting told off for going too near it.  

The 26th was an important day with an important task to be done, but we got side-tracked by Holly's suggestion that we should look for pine cones.  Off we went on a hunting expedition and found alder, fir, and large mysterious egg-shaped cones as well as pine.  But we couldn't stay there forever - it was our last session before the cafe was to close, so we held a little ceremony to thank then and say goodbye.  We made cards, using leaves we had gathered and pressed in the autumn, and paper flowers for each trainee or member of staff, and we sang them some of our favourite songs.  

This past Tuesday, 2nd April, was a similar story - there was work to be done (in this case, making a felt picture) but we got side-tracked by the frogspawn - again - in fact we have been checking up on them every week for a month or so.  The spawn keeps getting eating but the undaunted frogs keep returning for another go.  Let's hope some of it survives to froggy maturity.  

The Felt picture was a bit of a challenge until we gave up on trying to involve the children.  Once they were busy playing 'What's the time, Mr Wolf?' things went a lot more smoothly.  The adults laid out the fibres - first east to west, then north to south, then a coloured 'design' layer of flowers and patterns.  Then we wet it with soapy water and the kids could join in again, with the rubbing - first gently, then more vigorously, till it turned to a lovely cloth! 

Nesting time

Spring has definitely sprung in the park. The birds are going mad, the frogs are still spawning as if there were no tomorrow. We saw a little coal tit building his or her nest, lovely and round and soft by the looks of it. Then we built our own, and I have rarely seen such hardworking birds as those who were racing around gathering branches, bindweed, leaf litter and grass to make it just perfect. It was big enough for all the children to sit in for their story. But there was further work to be done. Where we planted bulbs two years ago, and daffodils and crocuses are now blooming beautifully, we planted some more. The children are really a gang of hard workers!

Events in the York Literature Festival at West Bank Park

This year West Bank Park has made its (to our knowledge) debut in the York Literature Festival with two events, a Spring Story Walk for adults and children, and 'Stories and Rhymes for Mad March Hares' for under-5s and carers. Both were on days of brilliant weather and were equally brilliantly attended - around 50 people each time trooping around the park listening to stories, poems (some real, some totally make-believe) from Anneliese Emmans Dean, Nettlefoot Kate (that's me!), Rosemary and Margaret from the 'big' Friends. See right for a few lovely photos.

FROGS!!!

The park is really waking up for spring: the bulbs have poked through and are starting to bloom, the birds are going crazy, and now, most excitingly of all, the frogs are spawning in the wildlife pond. We went, of course, to witness this spectacle. I personally had never seen so many frogs in one place - 20? 25? at least, climbing all over each other, blubbing up and down and all over the mass of frogspawn - neither the children nor the adults could believe their eyes. We lifted out some eggs in a jar and the children poked (some gingerly, some enthusiastically) at them.

Inspired by this, we went off to see what other wildlife we could find in the earth of the woods. We dug with spades and poked with sticks. We found earwigs, slugs, millipedes, tiny translucent snails, thousands of woodlice. An enormously long worm that didn't like being poked. The more craftily inclined among us made some creepy-crawlies of our own, using the time-honoured cutting-up-egg-boxes method.

On a sadder note, we have just discovered that our beloved cafe is to close in April. It will be sorely missed, especially on cold days. Anyone with any ideas to mark its passing and thank the staff for all they have done for us - let me know.

Timber!!!

West Bank Park is the scene of some rather dramatic tree surgery at the minute - men with tractors and diggers schlepping about through the woods and clearing lopping off enormous branches, sawing them up and hauling them around. It is probably just to prevent branches falling the next time heavy winds come, but the clearing has no bit of grass left and it is a bit alarming to watch the woods being so interfered with. For the adults, that is - the children are of course FASCINATED. But I personally will be relieved when they are gone.

However, we have to make the best of things, and the fact is that the clearing is surrounded by large and interesting lumps of wood in little groups. So we brought along toy cars and animals, and set up our own little road system of long logs, thin branches to make wobbly bridges between them, planks as 'slides'. At first it was the adults doing this, the children looking on bemused. Then a light went on and they rushed to play. Some had really good ideas: a wooden horse needed a bed and got one made of sawdust on the side of a quiet 'road'; a cow got a lean-to shelter built for it with twigs; more branches that were just the right shape or length needed to be sought out from the undergrowth. I think we will definitely repeat this activity at a later date.

Meanwhile, some of the children helped me 'wake up the bulbs' with some little bells - the snowdrops are just peeping out now. One little girl was perplexed that they didn't spring out straight away when she rang the bells - that is one for her mum to explain, I think. And some enthusiastically fed the birds in the wildlife area - what lucky birds to get such fistfuls of grain!

But by this time it was snowing hard, and too cold for most of us adults, so we went to the cafe for our story (about an old woman feeding the birds in her garden, of course) and lots of songs and rhymes.

New Year safari

This week was Chinese New Year. Laura treated us to the story of how the Chinese years got their names: how the Emperor asked twelve animals to run a race across the river, and named the years in the order they arrived on the other side. She gave the children masks to wear, to 'be' the animals, and afterwards we went 'hunting' animals in the woods - wooden and plastic animals that had been planted there by me and my kids just ten minutes earlier, obviously! But my kids were no less surprised than any of the others to 'find' them hiding in bushes and on tree stumps!

Then we adjourned to a secluded corner of the woods to get down to some tree-painting, using that expensive craft material, tap water. As long as it's a dry day this works beautifully, as the bark changes colour quite dramatically.

Also in attendance this week was one of the artists who is bidding for our art/mapping project this spring and summer. He quizzed us all about what we might like to see on the map he will produce if he gets the contract. Don't forget about the meeting on the 19th Feb to decide between the various bids (1pm, Rowntree Park cafe)

PUDDLES!!!

We did have something else planned for this week but the RAIN intervened. Well, there's no point in getting upset about it. Three brave families did turn up at the Park, despite the 'three raindrops' symbol on the weathermap, and obviously the theme of the morning was puddles. We all got sticks and found a good puddle - not too shallow, not too deep, not too small, not too big, just right for stirring. Then we found things to drop in to make a really tasty soup: berries, rotting beechnuts, crabapples, dead leaves, you know the sort of thing. There were a lot of arguments initially about who got the best berries or who got to mash the apple with their welly boot, but gradually the children started to cooperate a bit better and got very absorbed.

That puddle did keep us busy for a good long time - in fact, I think the children would have stayed there all morning. But adults have such short attention spans...so we headed off to the cafe to make pretend puddles with cardboard, glue and wool of various muddy colours. Then a really rowdy and vigorous singing-time and home we went.

Sometimes the rainy days are the good ones!

Wild boys of the woods...

I don't know what it is about boys, but there is definitely something...
Although it was cold, we stayed outside this Thursday and played in the woods. Ostensibly we were making percussion instruments with biscuit tins, and playing dressing-up races, but in fact, the BOYS were just going mad hurtling up and down the story tree mounds, stealing biscuit tins from each other, throwing minor and major tantrums. The poor (few) little girls were looking on wondering what on earth was going on.

It can sometimes be tricky to strike the right balance in wintertime, between 'planned' and 'unplanned' activities, crafts and free play. Luckily singing time is always a hit with most children and brings us all back together (with some of the wild boys as the band)!

Making Suncathers, 8 January 2009

This week was a very exclusive meeting of the Very Young Friends, consisting of myself (Bryony) Erin and Iona! The plan was to make suncatchers, so with everything prepared we went ahead, the sun even shone so we could try them out!