Never hurry and never worry

There are spiders everywhere at the moment; their webs are adorning our windows and decorating our drainpipes. They are building intricate web bridges around our garden gate, which means we don't dare open it.

Our new friend the garden cross spider

We love spiders, so when we started our new home ed forest school this week we were pleased to hear that the focus was going to be on these eight legged creatures. Before we left we thought about and retold stories we knew about spiders which included one of Ferdy's favourites about Arachne and Gil's Eric Carle's The Very Busy Spider. In addition to this we learnt about Anansi the Spider, a hero of West African folklore who is a renowned storyteller and trickster and often outwits those more powerful than him with cunning and guile.

It was a bit of a drive so we decided to start listening to one of my favourite books about another ingenious spider, Charlotte's Web, on the way.

The forest school is set in an old orchard within an organic farm and there were activities galore. After exploring the woods, we learnt about all the different types of spiders we can find and went on a picture hunt, ticking them all off.

Other tasks included: climbing trees, searching for spiders' webs, making mud cakes, creating a spider from pine cones, relaxing in hammocks, swinging in hammocks, making friends, gathering firewood, making popcorn on the campfire and building complicated inventions from ropes and then breaking them.

Our favourite spider of the day, however, was probably Charlotte of Charlotte's Web. One of the many knowledgable things she says to Wilbur the pig, is that he should never hurry and never worry. We have been doing rather a lot of hurrying and worrying recently, so it seemed right to take a little of the wise arachnid's advice on this beautiful, autumnal day.