Movers and shakers

Snow, ice and fog....but we battle on! There hasn't been a week with fewer than three families turning up to the group, which considering the weather we've been having is a true marvel. And more than that, we have been getting involved in the future of our dearly beloved park.

Today we met with Brian Williams, the council's 'Playgrounds Czar', to discuss the princely sum of £3000 of Ward Committee funding that we have received to improve the little children's playground. Many, many ideas were generated - treehouses, tunnels, dens/wendy houses, bird hides, obstacle courses, additional carriage for the 'bus', roundabout, 'bark pit' with pulley system....Brian was very helpful and will be supplying us with some costings and further ideas. And some group members are keen to investigate the possibility of matched funding, which would of course be fantastic! One very popular option was a sort of obstacle course made of logs and chains, meandering through the trees, possibly including a tunnel. Exciting stuff.

This winter has also seen rumblings in the council over budget cuts, and a threat to the Park Rangers team, including Stephen Whittaker who supports all volunteers and staff at West Bank Park. We had our very first 'Very Young Friends' demo - well, sort of - it was more of a friendly photo-opp with brightly coloured banners - and we couldn't even hold it in the park because of ice. But whether or not we had anything to do with it, the axe has been removed from the Rangers' heads and they are safe for another year at least. Everyone was extremely relieved to hear this - the Rangers keep the Parks developing, alive, hubs of their community - they organise events and educational work in the Park - they develop the parks' ecology, their playgrounds, they attract funding...

Personally, I was delighted that the children who got involved in this mini-political campaign, including my own, had the positive experience that their voices can be listened to.

On a quieter note, we have been doing the usual digging for worms, building fairy houses, and roaming through the woods. And lots and lots of singing!!! The children in the group at the minute are passionate singers.

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.