What We Do

ABOUT US

My name is Jemma Clark and my husband John Clark is a fulltime farrier. Together we run our farm with our children. I am from a an educational background focusing on special needs and challenging behaviour, I’ve done this for 15 years. Since having the opportunity to convert our barn into an educational farming classroom I now concentrate on this and teach from our home.

The Outdoor Classroom is focused on schools, youth groups and disadvantaged groups. VISITS ARE FREE FOR SCHOOLS. We also do free sessions for children from care homes or disadvantaged families. The vision is simple: children benefit from spending more time outdoors, especially in natural places like our farm. Its goal is equally simple: to increase the quantity, quality, and benefits of outdoor experiences for children. Farm learning promotes many things including the development of language. By children being curious it encourages them to want to know the names, breeds and ‘is it a girl or is it a boy’ of animals. Children can learn important academic information and theory, by learning through excitement and from all activities where they can listen, watch, observe, touch and sometimes ‘have a go’.

Visiting our farm involves healthy living for minds, a farm is an educational playground, walking around the stock, counting them to ensure they all there, watching a sheep (ewe) or a cow while giving birth and experience the process of it.

The farm is a perfect time for stories. Almost all children love listening to stories and a farm like ours with its many living things offers a pleasant opportunity and an adventurous place to tell one. The children will love it as they can relate to what the storyteller will be saying because the plants or animals will be within their vicinity.

Nature will be appreciated even more. Most children do not really know where food comes from, a visit to our farm will expose them and make them understand the origin of what they eat. They will learn how crops are grown and where meat comes from. The explanation may differ depending on the age of the children.

Working with natural England and the AONB we will ‘actively plan educational visits to the farm, typically covering topics such as food production, crop management and animal husbandry, as well as environmental conservation. These educational visits can include anything from showing how a wildflower meadow provides pollen and nectar for pollinating insects, to how a new plantation of trees prevents soil erosion, to how a plot of wild bird seed feeds our farmland birds over the winter. These educational farm visits capture the minds of children, helping to re-engage them with farming and the countryside in an age where people are increasingly removed from the food they eat and the environment they live in, where children can hear about farming, wildlife and food production straight from the farmer themselves.’ (natural England)

A typical day for the students involves farm-based activities including:

  • Animal care and countryside skills

  • Training in rural craft skills

  • Collecting eggs, feeding and cleaning the free-ranging organic hens

  • Feeding and caring for the pet lambs with a mixture of LLeyn, Hampshire down, Leicester, cheviots and other hill sheep.

  • Grooming the donkeys/pony and why we do this

  • feeding the native Deter cattle.

  • Learning how hay/straw is made

  • Understanding where food comes from

  • Herding sheep into the handling system to check welfare, worming, vitamins, spraying, hoof care, shearing, vaccinating,