Firstly, thanks to support from players of People’s Postcode Lottery, the school had an outdoor seating circle fitted by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust’s fantastic school grounds team, complete with a parachute and fire pit. There is a parachute that can be easily put up to provide shelter from rain or strong sunlight, and the fire pit offers a safe space to practise and learn about fire-lighting, so that other parts of the area won’t be damaged with scorch marks on the ground or burnt vegetation.

The seating circle is so much more than somewhere to sit around a fire though; it is a resource that widens the children’s learning. The seating circle’s wooden posts as the perfect substitute for mature trees, something the site currently lacks. Tie a tarp up between the posts and you have a shelter, or wrap wool or twine between two posts and you can make your own spiders webs. They also make a very good barley when you’re playing chasing games.

On top of this, with woodchip down in the middle of the seating circle, lots of fungi have started to grow. Some days the mushrooms look like a miniature forest, much to the children’s delight.

Teachers and pupils dedicated an area for minibeasts to thrive, bringing in logs and stones, so that classes can come down and watch insects without trampling on them. Within a couple of weeks, the logs were crawling with ants and woodlice, and the children spent a long time watching the ants carrying their eggs down into chambers. Every session there are always a few children who like to go and check on the minibeast area and see if anyone new has moved in.

In March, Mersey Forest joined the forest school children to plant young saplings and created a tree nursery. Both children and staff really enjoyed this activity and there is now a wide variety of new species growing on the site, including oak, yew, elder, scots pine, beech and silver birch. The children have been making an effort to water the trees in dry weather, and have been learning how to identify the different species. The trees have attracted other wildlife too. Butterflies have laid eggs underneath some of the trees’ leaves while a couple of the oaks that were planted have developed woody brown, circular galls – a sign that oak marble gall wasps have laid their eggs in the trees’ buds.

Normally, the school field is mown by a gardener every two weeks. However, since early spring, the gardener has been asked to leave the grass around the trees to grow, as well as a few other patches around the site. While these patches have been a great addition to games like hide and seek, the long grass is now also a refuge for wildlife, full of beetles, moths, bees and wildflowers. The children have been intrigued by the change in the grasses and plants as they grow taller. In fact, my favourite memory of working with the group was spending a summers afternoon laughing our heads off as adults and children alike all tried to master whistling with a blade of grass.