Family Hygge workshops: Safely inviting families into school to introduce Hygge

Guest blog post by Sarah Rawson, Normanton All Saints C of E (A) Infant School

"During the pandemic, our setting, like many others, were keen to not only spend the majority of our day outdoors but also encourage our families to do the same. Making the most of the daily walk quickly became part of the new ‘norm’ for families and schools in the world of home learning.     Our love for the outdoors continued to grow and this is when we stumbled upon the Wanderlust nature study program. This amazing 52 week plan has totally transformed our outdoor provision and the way in which we use our outdoor space. The level of engagement has increased, behaviour has improved and we have been in awe of the knowledge that the children had gained about the world around them. Inspired by Kimberly and her Nature Study, we enrolled onto the Hygge Early Year’s accreditation course.  Core values, such as a community and child-centered approach, a curriculum that focuses on well-being, the promotion of respect for each other and the word around them as well as encouraging sustainably, reflected our school vision and values. Consequently, we were immediately sold on the approach!                                                                                                     

Parents were initially informed about the Hygge accreditation through a letter, which was accompanied with a booklet of activities to try with their child when out and about in our local park or woodland. It was great to see parents becoming keen to share their outdoor adventures via our school twitter page. However, as with anything we implement within our school, we wanted to take this a step further. We were keen, especially after the past 18 months we had all had, to invite the parents in. We wanted them to feel, understand and live the Hygge way! We wanted to promote and celebrate families spending quality time together cooking, feeling cosy, embracing nature. 

With covid restrictions tightening once again we used this to embrace the opportunity to wrap up warm and plan parent and child workshops.  Each workshop would celebrate the seasons, learn about nature and the world around us, whilst embracing the feeling of Hygge. We then created a display that would greet the parents and to showcase our outdoor learning. This was an amazing way to show the wanderlust nature study and what Hygge looks like in the classroom, at home and in the community.

Our first workshop began with a brief introduction to the importance of studying nature and embracing it daily. We gave a demonstration on how families can create a nature shelf at home that embraces the seasons and provides the children with somewhere to showcase their nature treasures. As a community we do this well during important Christian festivals such as harvest, Christmas and Easter, however, we forget how nature can be embraced and celebrated all year round. We then further explored how this is done at Christmas time. Using natural foliage that the children had foraged from our outdoor space earlier in the week the families were encouraged to create a winter wreath. As we made our wreaths, we discussed our family Christmas traditions, the things we have enjoyed in Autumn and what we are looking forward to as winter approaches, such as warming hot chocolates after a cold winter walk. 

Workshop two gave us an opportunity to celebrate the Harvest, explore our vegetables grown in our school garden and those on the local farms around us. We then used these vegetables to cook a family meal of soup and tomato pinwheels. Sustainability has always been of high importance at our school, knowing where our food comes from and the journey it takes from farm to fork. On site we have a small meadow where we plant wild flowers, a mini orchard with a wide variety of fruit trees, lots of vegetable boxes growing around school and our very own chicken coup where the children take turns to care for the chickens and collect the eggs to cook in our school Breakfast club.  

In workshop three we looked more closely at the season of Autumn and the animals we would see around our local environment. We explored the terms hibernation and nocturnal. We then further developed our physical skills by encouraging families to work as a team to collect food for the winter. Each family were assigned a winter food (coloured bean bag) to collect. However, just like the cheeky squirrels, we had just explored other families could also take your winter stash. After all the fun and games our families were then encouraged to think about how animals in nature build a warm safe environment to shelter in over the winter. Using den building kits, they worked together to build their own waterproof cosy den and Mr. Price was of course waiting with a watering can to test just how waterproof these dens were! After decorating our dens with warm and cosy lighting and our wreaths we settled down to a story with our soup that we had cooked earlier. We then read the story ‘A book for Bramble.’ The story created a perfect end to our wonderful family event as it celebrates the special bond between friends and explores the changes in the season.

It was such a pleasure to be able to safely invite our parents back into school during these uncertain times. Nurturing the well-being of the family and building positive relationships between staff and parents is essential if we are all to move forward after what has been a very hard testing time for all."

 For more information on Hygge do