What a Wild Wednesday Actually Looks Like at Our School

Following my appearance on Teachers' Talk Radio this week, I've been writing about outdoor education. On Monday I wrote about why it matters. Today I want to show you what it actually looks like, because the detail is the whole point.

People ask me what Wild Wednesday is and I usually start by confessing that my senior leadership team mock me relentlessly for my love of alliteration. We have Wild Wednesdays, Funky Fridays where we play music outside before school, alliterative class awards in Red Carpet Assembly ("Otterly Awesome Otters" is a recent favourite) and our "Fishy Friends" who look after the school tropical fish. It's become a running joke. But it's also part of the identity of the school, and children remember things that have personality.

Wild Wednesday has four elements: Forest School, gardening, PE and French. I'll hold my hands up and say French doesn't sound particularly "wild," but it connects to something I care deeply about. Having worked in international schools where young children learnt languages as a core part of their week, I brought that expectation back with me. So French sits alongside the mud and the wellies because all of it is about breadth, ambition and giving children experiences that go beyond the basics.

Each class spends a half term doing either French and PE or Forest School and gardening, then they rotate. On any given Wednesday, one class is in Forest School and one class is in the garden.

Forest School

I should say that Emma, my deputy, would do a much better job of talking about Forest School than me. It's her area of expertise and she's phenomenal at it. Every session starts at the fire circle, where the activities for the week are laid out. These change with the seasons. One week the children might be using natural materials to make dyes. Another week they're printing, using palm drills to make medallions, whittling, tying knots, building shelters from branches and tarpaulins. There's bark rubbing, weaving with willow, mud kitchen play for the younger ones, minibeast hunts and tree identification. Alongside the structured activities there's always free play: climbing, the agility zone, den building, wildlife spotting. The balance between guided activity and free exploration is important. What it looks like in November is completely different to what it looks like in May, and that's part of the point. The seasons shape the learning.

Gardening

Gardening is where my heart is, I'll admit. Every session starts the same way: we walk through the school garden, through the polytunnel and the allotment, so the children can see how things have grown since last week. That matters more than it sounds. They're tracking change over time without realising they're doing it.

We begin with what I call our "game," which is really maintenance. Weeding, collecting sticks, gathering leaves. We always explain why. Then we move into our Plant of the Week and Tool of the Week, with all the vocabulary that goes with them. I do a short teaching input. This week we were planting second earlies, so we talked about chitting, earthing up, why potatoes need that treatment. These are Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 children using specialist vocabulary and understanding real horticultural processes.

The main part of the session is busy. Activities are targeted towards our gardening curriculum: specific seeds, plant and life cycles we want the children to explore. But it's deeply practical too. This week the children moved topsoil from the car park to fill raised beds. They harvested purple sprouting broccoli and pak choy from the polytunnel, which went straight to Danielle, our kitchen manager, and was served at lunchtime.

A couple of weeks ago we harvested radishes. You would not think radishes would be high on any child's list of favourite vegetables. But when we chopped them up and took them around Year 1 and Year 2, almost every child tried one. They didn't all like it. But they all tried it, because they grew it and they knew where it came from. That connection between growing and eating is extraordinarily powerful and you can't manufacture it from a worksheet.

I have Val, a wonderful volunteer who's been at Fetcham since long before me. Together we've extended and expanded what was a much smaller garden. She does brilliant work with the children on propagation: taking cuttings, explaining how they work. We took a batch in the winter and they've now started to root, which the children find genuinely fascinating.

Part way through, the children have their fruit and we play a quick recap game: vocabulary from previous weeks, plants of the week, growing terms. Then back to their activities.

Why It Works

Here's the thing I always come back to. On a Wild Wednesday, almost no children ask to go to the toilet. Almost nobody complains about the weather. When children are genuinely engaged, when they have ownership of what they're doing and can see the point of it, behaviour and engagement take care of themselves.