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Fun Education at Glasto!
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Glasto Education
The time of the year has arrived again; where we pack up our bags, do as much food shopping as we can and head out to Glastonbury Festival with our wellies in tow….just incase.
This is an important time of year for us, as it’s a big family event. Grandma Doo runs things, Grampa plays, and all the cousins and aunts and uncles travel over from wherever they are to dig in and lend a hand.
Well, a lot of them. ALL of them would be pure madness! We have been very lucky to have had this opportunity for the past few years (Covid aside) to take the kids to muck in with the big family scrum, cement connections that can oh-os-easily fall by the wayside amongst busy lives, and get to have one hell of an experience along the way!
Table of Contents
- Craft tents
- Printing press
- cost/budget
- Kids field
- Circus tent
- Family
Festival Time!
Our time is generally spent quite heavily between the Kids’ and Circus fields, around a carefully curated gig selection. We make sure we allot plenty of downtime, and rest periods so as not to over-do the kids (or ourselves!) so we tend to plan before we go what bands we’d like to see, in order of priority – and accept the fact that compromises will be made in the who and how of attending. We usually aim for a kid-centric morning outing, leaving the Bigman in bed, then head back for lunch and a rest back at the caravan before catching a gig or two, then chilling a bit more before heading out for something in the evening if we can.
Day-bags are kept packed, with water, a snack, a mac and a hat at all times, and ready to grab and go. With 8-hour suncream on when you get dressed, because then you don’t have remember to reapply!
Kids Field
Although not the first place you think of as being an educational environment; the opportunities for learning and discovery are rife around the festival. To start with the most obvious, the Kids Field offers a whole range of experiences; which we availed ourselves of with gusto- Big making a beeline for the Gyroscope that she had not been tall enough to go on the year before. The next stop was the Science tent, for some Cyanotype printing – a fantastically tangible experiment with iron compounds.
There are music lessons on all sorts of instruments, hands -on circus skills, art and crafts (which I have to admit that I avoid like the plague- lest I have piles of glittery cardboard to carry all the way home!) a HUGE marionette monkey to explore cause and effect with and the mechanics of levers and pulleys.
To escape the sun (or have a nap!) when it gets hot, you can head into the big tent to check out what’s on stage – from Basil Brush and Bodger and Badger covering you in MASHED POTATO, to your favourite CBBC stars. We even ran into Andy taking his own kids down the slide at the pink palace last year.
Balance, Co-ordination and Strength
Anywhere you are in the festival, everywhere you look there are opportunities to learn and explore new processes. While playing around the huge wooden play castle at the top of the Kids Field we spotted these markings on the structure and started asking questions, as I was almost certain I knew what they would be….
So on getting back to the caravan, we researched the origins of written language and even managed to translate the panels……but I won’t spoil it for you. 😉
Circus Tent
The circus tent is rife with material for lazy daytime learning, too. Exploring forces with Gravity, Weight and even Centrifugal when the motorbikes come out to play, whizzing breathtakingly past each other in the cage.
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