Try Stick Carving - Forest School Activities

What is Try Stick Carving?

The try stick project is a wonderful introduction to wood carving and whittling. I was taught how to offer the try stick as a carving workshop by Willow Lohr during an Owl Networking event at Pillars of Hercules in Fife in 2022. I'm very happy two children on our February forest school in Glasgow were keen to make their own so I finally got to teach it. Forest School is child/participant led, and I'd not had any takers for a year despite offering it several times.

Mors' Kochanski is widely credited as the creator of the Try Stick project in the 1960s, and he admits he got the idea of putting all these different cuts on to one stick from a Scouts Pamphlet.

Peeling the bark off the stick is the first step. The children pictured here are 7 years old. One of the children was already pretty confident whittling and for the other it was their second time using a fixed blade knife to carve.

The try stick activity is a perfect way to focus young minds that are keen and excited to use knives safely. In this project they get to realise their own creative power with what's usually seen as a risky or a inappropriate tool, and they get to understand how their developing skills impact on the material world.

In this picture you can make out that they are chamfering by holding the stick and knife close-in, and pushing the back of the knife off the corner of the stick. These children had an established friendship before they came to forest school, and there was an element of competition motivating them through the project. I took that as a positive and they both learned how to make v-cuts, stop cuts, chamfer and how to peel by the end of the session. Plus, we were all very proud of ourselves and what we'd created.

Owl events for Forest School Leaders and outdoor learning practitioners can be found here

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