Making Woodland Crafts: Using Green Sticks, Rods, Poles, Beads, and String

Through a series of visually stunning, hand-drawn illustrations, Patrick Harrison guides the reader on a productive journey through the woods. It provides the basic knowledge and skills to complete a range of both simple and more advanced craft projects, from functional structures to creative outdoor play forms. You will learn to choose and work your wood effectively, use simple tools, tie knots and develop your own designs. Projects include building masks and puppets, night torches, staffs, arrows, jewelry, ladders, shelters, and chairs for stargazing.

Making Woodland Crafts is the perfect companion for any family outdoor day, a joyful introduction to the crafts available in any piece of woodland. It is guaranteed to get children--as well as parents, siblings, grandparents--out and about and enjoying nature.

Author: Patrick Harrison
Publisher: Hawthorn Press
Published: 01/15/2015
Pages: 112
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.50h x 7.90w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781907359378

About the Author
Harrison, Patrick: - Through his personal struggles as a child bewildered by schooling, Patrick has developed a passion for alternative learning processes. For many years he has recognized the vitally important role of creativity in education, as a tool to develop flexibility in thinking, confidence and self esteem. Due to his own experience and the witnessing of others, he has also developed a thorough understanding of the impact of doing, playing and deep level learning on all areas of development as a catalyst for fundamental and lasting change.

Patrick's background is in creative expression, through professional painting, graphic design and environmental arts. He taught reflexive art classes for many years, and drumming and rhythm in schools and with adults with special needs. This has given him a grounding in awareness of how the body offers a memory of its own, independent of cognitive processes, and the reality of collective intelligence, fundamentally linked to deep level learning.

Patrick has also used the building of structures in the outdoors, primarily Celtic roundhouses, as an inspirational platform for education and holistic development. It was through this experience, initially, that he found out about Forest Schools, and subsequently trained as a Forest Schools level 3 practitioner.

For many years he developed Montgomeryshire Forest School, locating several sites in the area, which some fifty local schools have benefited from. The projects also involved a number of local communities, Millennium Volunteers and Youth Offender teams.

As a full time level 4 Forest School trainer he has also trained hundreds of teachers, independent practitioners and other professionals, to deliver Forest School programs all over the UK.