Forest School Handbook

Forest School Handbook is a lively collection of activities, crafts, bushcraft skills, and nature-based play designed to inspire kids to thrive outside. Whether you're just popping out for a walk, going camping, or exploring in the woods, this handy-sized book will be your essential guide for connecting with the natural world.

Packed with ideas and activities for children of all ages, the book includes bushcraft basics, survival skills, nature crafts, and ideas for both energising and peaceful outdoor play. Encouraging controlled risk-taking, it boosts social skills, wellbeing, and healthy resilience. This is the ultimate way to avoid battles over screen time and classroom-induced fatigue.

Learn how to build a shelter from materials around you, design a natural collage, tie useful knots, get to know a tree, light a fire, filter dirty water, make charcoal, go on a night walk, make a bug hotel, create a mini village, whittle a stick, and much more.

Authors: Naomi Walmsley and Dan Westall run Outback2Basics (www.outback2basics.co.uk) from their patch of woodland in Shropshire, UK. Specialising in bushcraft and Stone Age skills, they provide unique experiences for schoolchildren and teachers to connect to nature.

Dan has been a bushcraft teacher for many years and has also acted as a medic and survival consultant on various TV shows. Naomi is a qualified bushcraft instructor and Forest School Leader. She believes that every child should be able to safely light a fire and have at least ten uses for a stick by the age of ten. Naomi has also written about bushcraft and parenting for many magazines, including Bushcraft & Survival Skills, Living Woods, and Juno.

Together, they undertook a five-month Stone Age immersion experience in the US, living in the wilderness without any modern equipment, an experience which profoundly influenced their lives and teaching.