Published in April 2013, Wolf Brother's Wild Woods is an attractive educational resource produced by Forestry Commission Scotland with support from University of Glasgow and Forest Education Initiative. It is designed to be used by school teachers working in the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence Level 2: Level 2 being expressed as 'To the end of P7, but earlier or later for some' (P7 typically being age 10-11).
Wolf Brother refers to a fictional book by Michelle Paver, set in the Mesolithic of northern Europe, about the experiences of a 12 year old boy called Torak. The resource Wolf Brother's Wild Woods is intended to be used in conjunction with reading of Michelle Paver's book and to develop themes in the book to deliver outcomes in Curriculum for Excellence. The resource promotes and supports outdoor activity based learning in a woodland context.
The book benefits from a good range of attractive illustrations (a minor quibble being that they are inconsistently captioned) and is accompanied by two loose A3 fold out figures, 'The Raven Camp' and 'Coastal Resources', showing evocative scenes of Mesolithic life.
While there is a great deal of flexibility in how the activities suggested in the resource could be tailored to different subjects, it could have benefited from a more explicit correlation between suggested activities and intended learning outcomes.
Despite these minor criticisms, the publication of an imaginative educational resource which promotes learning about the Mesolithic is to be greatly welcomed. While designed for the Scottish context the resource should still be of interest and value to educators elsewhere. We can only hope that Forestry Commission Scotland through Forest Education Initiative will produce further period based educational resources such as this.
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