Well, that's a good start for building some skills. It would be interesting if they built it up to the proper size, then got in it while you simulated rain over it, so they could actually see how effective their efforts would be.

As kids we hacked and burned all sorts of foliage out behind our house in the 13 years I was there, so did most of our neighborhood friends. For all our efforts (and they were prolific), you'd never have known of any of it if you didn't go looking. At one point, we managed to start a small forest fire and got the fire department called on us. That was a painful lesson, and taught us to be more clandestine and plan ahead a little better.

A couple years after I came home from my first (and only) tour in the Navy, I was disappointed to see that the whole forest had been cleared by a developer, and all our special little forts and camps and gathering areas in the woods were gone. Our collection of playboys from the 70s were no more, and our stash of emergency toilet paper (alder leaves proved unacceptable while day camping, and our stash of beer we stole from dad had all been scoured away along with all those beautiful Douglas fir and Western Hemlocks we'd played around and chopped and sawed and burnt. Nothing we ever did, it seemed, could ever make a dent in that forest, but I was told it took the devleoper's contractor a week to log off all the trees, rake the stumps into a slash pile, and basically turn the hillside into another fenced in row of ticky tacky houses.

Get your kids out there and hack as many limbs as it takes to make them proficient at doing something in a natural setting and find some value in doing it often, before it is gone. Lopping a few limbs on a regular basis isn't going to devastate any forest; it may actually benefit the land, much like selective logging does.

People who fanatically insist we must leave the forests unperturbed and pristine just don't understand how nature works. If I could, I would send every school-age kid out into the forest as often as possible and do just what red did. That might be the best way to insure that at least some of the forests aren't turned into tract housing. This notion that limbing a tree or two or two hundred is somehow going to cause global deforestation is just not realistic. Heck, the forest service does far more of that in a year as maintenance in the places I roamed than me and all my friends could ever have hoped to in our entire childhood.