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.