Our Week in the Forest...
This week has been especially spectacular having the variety of different ages coming together to play! The holiday campers have been with us all week and we have had a tremendous time, all the children have dazzled the educators with their inspiration and levels of imagination.
We started the week deep in the jungle grass, which swishy swashed around with our feet (and ears for some children)! The grass galvanised lots of games: Frisbee, tag, and one of the most popular was looking for the ‘CRUNCHER MONSTER!’. The children gathered together as Libby explained about a 6th sense we all hold within us, that 6th sense can see the colossal Cruncher monster that loves to play chase amidst the gigantic grass! The children loved this as they began crunching their arms together in mid-air, capturing the monster and taking him back to camp!
During the warmest parts of the day the children gathered under Oak trees for shade, and underneath were lots of different resources to get creative. Amy and Ruth supported children with creating a crown of their choice, some were magically colourful, using bits of fallen grass and flowers, others were incredibly technical and constructed as dinosaurs with tails and leaves as scales! With this inspiration, the children’s role playing became flamboyant, especially with a new pink fairy outfit that Sylvia sourced. It will always amaze us educators how well the children share props and show empathy and patience in the forest!
Anya has really settled in this week, and her creativity and passion for working with children has shone! Throughout the week she has been building bug hotels with the children, which the group decided, ‘The hotel is open for all bugs!’! The hotel was fitted with a ladder for the bugs to climb to the reception, and some children made a little village where the bugs could, ‘Wait until their room was clean!’. As we hunted for bugs to invite them to our new hotel, cost free, we took identification sheets around on adventure walks and on site. ‘There’s a baby ladybug!’, one of the holiday campers suggested, one of the regular children politely explained, ‘Yes, it is a baby, it’s called a ladybug Larva!’! This opened a whole discussion about which lady bird it was going to be, and the children voted their opinions – resulting in any one of the children being correct, but we wouldn’t know until the ladybug got bigger! All these activities were great for social skills and for fine motor skills as there was lots of tying tiny knots!
Another activity which we took to the shade was mixing paints. The children quoted, ‘We want to make the darkest colour we can!’. As they were mixing, they noted that the solution was getting sticky and slimy. This was then used as a trap in their role playing, ‘It’s so slimy it can stick you to it!’. We then talked about where slime comes from, children discussed about slugs and snails being slimy, and this is where they agreed that slime comes from.
It’s been another fun packed week, the children are happy, and we have all had such a wonderful time! We hope you have a delightful weekend in the heat wave, and we cannot wait to see what next week brings!
Little Forest Folk
Barnes