7 Five-Minute Forest School Warm-Up Games

Every forest school session we run starts the same way: five minutes to shake off the school day, wake up cold fingers, and get everyone looking at the woodland around them before the “real” activity begins. None of these need any kit beyond what’s already in your bag, and all of them work whether you’ve got three children or thirty. Here are seven we come back to again and again.

1. The colour hunt

Give each child a strip of coloured card – brown, green, grey, or red – and set them loose for five minutes to find something in the woodland that matches. Bark, moss, a robin’s feather, fallen leaves: it all counts. Back at the fire circle, everyone shares their find and explains why they chose it.

2. Animal walks

Ask children to move like different animals across a short stretch of ground: fox creep, frog hop, bear crawl, bird flap. A lap or two gets blood pumping and shakes off any leftover classroom stillness. Older children like inventing their own animal and having the group guess it.

3. Spot the difference

Set up three or four natural objects in a small clearing before the group arrives – a pinecone, a stick arranged just so, a stone. Let everyone look for thirty seconds, then close their eyes while you move or remove one item. Whoever spots the change first chooses the next round’s objects.

Add more items for groups of older children, or keep adding an item until it becomes too hard!

4. Camouflage

One child (or a leader) is the seeker, and everyone else has one minute to hide within a clearly marked boundary, using only natural materials already lying around – no bags, no digging. It’s a good one for teaching children how colour and shape blend into woodland, framed as fun rather than a lecture.

5. Stick and leaf relay

Split into small teams and race in relay, each child balancing a leaf on a stick (or a bit of bark, a conker, whatever’s to hand) without steadying it with their other hand. Simple, a little silly, and it gets legs moving without needing space to properly run.

6. Copy the leader

Stand in the fire circle and take turns being “leader” – clapping, stamping, arm swings – while everyone else copies. It’s low-energy enough for a cold, wet morning when nobody wants to run about, but it still gets bodies working and attention on the group.

7. Weather mime

Ask each child in turn to act out what the weather or season feels like that day, no words, just movement, and let the rest of the group guess. It’s a nice way of tuning children into the environment right at the start of the session, and it works in any weather – that’s rather the point.

None of these take more than five or ten minutes, and swapping between them keeps things fresh across a term. If you run your own forest school or outdoor club, we’d love to hear which warm-ups work for your group.