Forest Schools Camps weeks at the Dome Garden
For five years now the Dome Garden has been providing exceptional, eco holidays for environmentally conscious individuals, families and groups of friends.
Three-quarters of our guests in 2014 came with school age children and many of those were on their second, third, fourth or even fifth visit.
For 2015 we want to offer the same opportunity to children in forest schools groups and staff looking for a safe, exciting, adventurous location where they can bring their students for an educational week of compelling, environmentally based camp activities.
What do we have?
A dozen geodesic domes – some canvas, some solid – across a compact and secure site that can be split down the middle to allow for one school to bring two classes or for two schools to bring one class each.
On-site activities that are as broad as they are flexible, with everything you’d expect in a forest schools programme from intensive bushcraft sessions to bow making, foraging, rocket stove construction, permaculture, hydroponics, sustainable development, den building, fire lighting, tree climbing, leaps of faith and much, much more.
Off-site there is mountain biking, hill walking, horse riding, pony trekking, canoeing, abseiling and deep cave walking, to name just a few.
But the big deal is the domes themselves. Fantastic soaring structures which are not just comfortable and warm, but are light, airy and completely inspiring. They are a springboard for educational investigation across a broad range from physics and maths, to philosophy, music and art. They are also quite luxurious with wood burning stoves and private ensuites, with woodfired showers and flushing loos.
The other big deal is…
The Food.
We enjoy making great food and many people come back just for that. For School Camps, the offering caters to younger palates with delicious, organic, fresh and nutritious meals.
This summer it features our newest passion; properly cooked barbecue food, smoked and finished on a Japanese robata grill that we have been building over the winter. And no-one leaves the Dome Garden without having experienced our increasingly famous pizzas – made by the students themselves and cooked in our giant wood fired oven.
The Point
Away from the practical, the Dome Garden Forest Schools experience is about starting a journey. It’s about making things possible, about over-reaching expectations and about stepping out of the norm. One of our mottos is ‘ Not like it is at home’. One thing you can be sure of School Camps here – nothing will be like it is at home!
The point is to make us look again at the way we live our lives, to learn about the impact we have on the planet we live in and to see how it is affected by the communities that make it up.
If your students leave here after a Forest Schools Camps week, better prepared, with new skills, increased confidence and the hint of a new outlook then we will have the done the right thing.
The ‘Build a Programme’ Programme
There are a million ways to run a Forest Schools Camps week at the Dome Garden, but before we suggest a programme we need to know what you know and where your students are. Then we can design a programme that encourages them to take small steps forward – not giant leaps that stretch them too far, nor backward steps that retread old ground they’ve covered already.
Tell us what you want, tell us what you need and between us we’ll happily deliver both.
The Testimonial That Says It All.
A group of 50 and 60-something women came to stay with us this summer. Not school children by any means but still open minded and keen to learn. This is how one of them summed it up.
“We kept telling ourselves that we ‘got it’ and that we felt quite at home,” she said.
“We kept telling ourselves how clever we were to have mastered the tea making, the heating of the water, the sourcing of the wood and even the pizza making.
Then on the morning of the third day we did all those things without thinking about it and without telling ourselves anything at all. We sat down, freshly showered, with our piping hot cups of tea boiled in the hurricane kettles, to eat eggs and bacon from the rocket stoves and found that this strange life had become normal.
In a flash, we realised that we really did indeed “get it” now. And we realised we most certainly hadn’t “got it” before.
It was like a bolt of lightning and we spent the rest of the day, felling bigger, taller, with our heads held slightly higher. It was like someone had lifted us up – even at our time of life. We were walking on air!”
Talk to us
There is so much more to life and opportunities at THE DOME GARDEN but if this sounds like the sort of thing that you and your students might like to work with, please come back to us to find out more.
There is a host of information on the website, there are lovely people on the end of an email or a phone and there are even staff in the Gloucester education department you can talk to about what it’s like here.
Either way think about it and then get in touch and we’ll see what we can sort out.