Wild Thursdays: Nature, Skills and Chill Time

Wild Thursdays is back at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens on Thursday 5 November, from 1pm to 3pm. It's a ten-week Forest School course for home-educated young people aged 12-16, and it's free to take part.

The sessions are hands-on and learner-led, which is the key thing here: the group decides what they want to get stuck into, and the activities follow their lead. Over the course of the ten weeks, that means working with tools and green woodworking, cooking over a campfire, making nature crafts, building shelters and exploring wildlife. It's not a set curriculum you just follow along with; the sessions are shaped by the interests of the young people who show up.

It's run as part of Culture Start, a programme set up to get children and young people in Sunderland into free creative and cultural activities. The course is listed on the Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens' own site, though the building itself is currently closed while it goes through a £13.6m transformation. The event appears in the museum's Object of the Month series, which is produced with Sunderland Heritage as part of a collections project made possible by a Museum Renewal Fund grant from Arts Council England.

If you've got a home-educated teen who'd rather be outdoors and making things than sitting at a desk, this is exactly the kind of thing to keep them busy. It's free, it's for ages 12-16, and it runs from 1pm to 3pm on Thursday 5 November at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens.