Our Week in the Forest...
The wild animals theme from last week continued in the forest this week and carried along by strong winds there was love in the air!
Our Little Forest Folk-ers have curiously noticed the frost on the grass of the cricket field on our walk in each morning, this prompted them to compare frost and ice. The children enjoyed comparing other materials in the forest when they had to guess, only using the sense of touch, things that we find in our woodland; like moss, bark, leaves. In the meantime some of the other children were really busy in the mud kitchen preparing crumpets for everyone.
The wind this week didn’t stopped the children exploring the nature around them, it actually made their role play even more fun by making their superhero capes and flags float. The costume box turned some children into Little Forest Folk educators with walkie talkies and bumbags, whilst others changed their identities to become their friends. The new 'educators' were busy setting up camps, making sure the headcount was always checked and that the children (which now included a group of actual educators) were involved in games. Apart from the costume box, the new wheelbarrows made an appearance in the forest and the children showed great sharing skills without holding onto them too long to make sure everyone could have a go collecting sticks and wheeling them around the site.
A visit at the Little Forest Folk zoo is a must, you can spot wild animals like a rhino and even stingrays but also more local animals like deer. At some point a stingray stung another one, which sadly was fatal for the second stingray. This lead to some museum role-play where the children became animals on display and some were the visitors. We had a cobra, a hippo, two T-Rex’s, a sting ray and a fox! Once our visitors had been to the museum the children sent the educators to sleep. That was when the magic happened… at night all the animals in the museum came back to life!
The next day, when we found our way back to our base camp we discovered that all the pinecones that the children had filled with a mixture of coconut oil and seeds had been eaten by the birds. Everyone was very excited about this discovery and asked to make some more. We had Gavin in the forest this week and we enjoyed knot making and den building whilst some of the children were busy building bird’s nests. In the afternoon we played tag games to make sure the children wouldn’t fly away with the wind!
When recently we were able to go back to our site, after the rangers took down a dry tree, we found lots of new logs had been added to our base camp! This gave us the opportunity for some of the children to practice their tool work with a bow saw. With the help of the educators they tried to cut one of the logs in half. They still have a long way to go but they made good progress in one afternoon getting halfway through it. Later on the children enjoyed a very long pretend train journey to Chacha, passing through Eyeballland, Lightland, Jellyland, Glassland, Waterland, Cardboardland and many more towns!
We could tell that Valentine’s day was approaching and on Thursday love was in the air! Some children were sending love messages to the educators on a spare walkie talkie. One child could see the world around them all pink (probably also because they were wearing pink heart shaped glasses). Given the strong wind of this week, we varied our base camp a few times and we are really pleased to see how easily the children adapt to a new location as well as setting camp up! They really enjoy exploring and playing in our new environment.
We hope everyone has a lovely weekend and enjoys the outdoors as much as we do! For our sessional families we wish you all a great half-term!
Little Forest Folk
Barnes