Its been an incredibly busy but wonderful time at the Inspirational Outdoors Conference at the start of this week.   My head is busily digesting everything and eager to put some new ideas into practice.   

This is the second year of the conference, it was fantastic last year and has now grown into a 2 day event packed full of workshops, talks, discussions and so many amazing ways of sharing ideas; the delegates came from across the UK with some international presence too and the ideas were flowing all over with such excitement.   

I was really delighted to be running sessions this year, as well as attending the whole conference, it was a deeply immersive experience and the layers of inspiration run deep.   I camped at the venue along with a few other participants, which enabled us to cook our meals outside as we watched dusk set in and continued to discuss so many aspects of creativity outside.   The 20 minute walk down the hillside to the beach is an added bonus and enabled us to be sat on the sand watching the sun sink below the horizon as we unpicked our ideas and thoughts around the millions of ways connections with nature encourage creativity, calm, learning and ignite curiosity.

I ran sessions which were a bit of a whistle-stop tour of exploring ways of working with clay outside and of working with natural materials to generate colours; the participants were wonderful with their ideas and enthusiasm and warm energy as we explored lots of different things.   It left me buzzing with further ideas and being able to share thoughts about ways of working creatively outside with groups feels very important.   It feeds deeply into all the long term groups I'm working with in Nottingham and Derbyshire. 

I was able to participate in so many sessions, discussions and listen to talks, its such a vital thing to have time to do this, it reinforces so much and ignites so many ideas.   Meeting and listening to Niki Buchan speak was wonderful, she'd travelled in from Australia to talk with a wealth of knowledge and examples of outdoor education from across the world.   We were all transfixed.  The fantastic Gill Mulholland from The Eden Project ran brilliant sessions on using the outside to ignite stories and poems and so much more, I also learnt to make pewter casts over an open fire, something I've wanted to have a go at for ages, the really lovely Lisa Chell ran a  great session on this.    Phil Waters ran a wonderful storytelling quest with the entire set of delegates and there was so much more going on, its hard to know where to start to digest it all!

The venue is the deeply inspirational Mount Pleasant Eco Park which holds unexpected delights at every turn - worth a visit just to see everything that's being developed there.  

​The conference is organised by the wonderful Niki Willows an outdoor play specialist and Martin Besford of Highway Farm (again, one of the most inspirational educational settings I've visited in the UK).  

Details of next years conference are here: ​https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inspirational-outdoors-2019-cornwalls-outdoor-play-learning-conference-tickets-47063722862?aff=erelexpmlt

HUGE THANKS for the photographs below, I was too busy to take many images this year, so most of the images below were taken either by Martin Scull for the conference or by Simon Turk of Treecreepers which I am incredibly grateful for.  

Yesterday I was delighted to find frogspawn in the pond in my own garden and the joy this brought caused me to reflect upon the wonders of ponds at home but also in spaces where we can all encounter the wildlife to be found there.

We created a wildlife friendly pond at Dunkirk Primary School about 2 years ago and its greatly enhanced the Discovery Garden we are working on there.  The children - and staff - are fascinated by the tiny creatures, the plant life ("its like dinosaur trees") and the reflections in the water.  The school has another pond also in the Nature Garden, so we are incredibly lucky to have two rich wetland areas which all the children can access to enhance their learning about the world around them.  Both wetland areas are in spaces used for contemplation and careful considered study of the natural world; children are taken in groups with adults.

There's something incredibly calming and contemplative about being near water.  There's so much detail to be discovered and this prompts endless stories, descriptions and questions.  Pond creatures are amazing - and it offers children the opportunity to look closely but also carefully and with great consideration and respect.


There's wonderful information available online about ponds in wildlife friendly gardens such as Froglife, The Freshwater Habitats Trust and The Wildlife Trusts.

As part of a series of work at Dunkirk Primary and Nursery School, I'm working with all the children and some family groups at Abbey Campus to create a series of clay tiles for the entrance area.

I use clay a lot in many projects (and have done for years, its one of my favourite materials), but I usually use it in a very open-ended way without firing it.  However these tiles will be fired - and will form part of a series of artworks, signs, welcome messages and adornments of the outside entrance area at the new campus of the school.

The children have been using clay with me for some time and have built up a series of techniques as they've explored many different things they can do with clay; they've been incredibly articulate about the things they've discovered.  We've been exploring different ways of working with clay before we've begun to work on these tiles - and this means the children have a great dexterity and awareness of manipulating clay.

Rather than set a specific shape and size of tile, I've been showing them how to wedge, roll and cut their own squares and rectangles - which means we are building up a whole series of tiles that will fit together but which have their own uniqueness.

I'm loving the patterns that are emerging - lots of discoveries of creating different imprints with all sorts of objects.  There's also been lots of excited discoveries about ways of building up raised patterns and using slip ("its like glue") and cross-hatching to stick things together.

We've set up a working area with a series of images to give us ideas and a growing collection of things that imprint patterns into the clay (some favourites are lace, duplo, pencils and string).

Its also been wonderful to work with the parents group to create tiles too - they've had some fantastic ideas and its so important to include them in this project.