Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust’s (BBOWT) education teams at Woolley Firs and Windsor Great Park are hosting Face your Fears: Spooky Skeletons and Deathly Drawings for 4-11 year olds.

The sessions will be held in collaboration with the world’s biggest drawing festival The Big Draw, which this year will explore wellbeing, expression and empowerment through creativity.

Combining ecology, literature and drawing children and their families will be introduced to themes of life and death, decay, decomposition and recycling of nutrients. Participants can follow an activity trail and take part in activities about predators, decomposers, poisons and other nasty nature in the woods!

Children will use torches to find the quiz clues in books, such as Funny Bones and Fungus the Bogeyman, that are dangling among the cobwebs.

Using large scale-drawing and printmaking techniques they can have fun creating a skeletons’ parade, using themselves as models or taking inspiration from a variety of bones, skeletons and taxidermy animals on display (kindly loaned by Eton Natural History Museum) as well as their experiences on the trail.

“Exposure to nature and creative activities are recognised as therapeutic and beneficial to health and wellbeing,” says BBOWT’s Living Landscapes Manager, Hilary Phillips.

“Combining both activities in a stimulating and fun way should give families a double-dose of goodness and help them face their fears of nature’s darker side – the slimy, the dead and the decaying.”

To join in the fun at Windsor Great Park Environmental Centre on Monday, October 28 and Woolley Firs, outside Maidenhead on Wednesday, October 30 and Thursday, October 31 please book online at bbowt.org.uk/events