Our Week in the Forest...
It's been a very exciting week at Barnes as we have now moved to our Putney Heath site and welcomed lots of new friends to our Little Forest Folk family. We have all really enjoyed walking straight from the cricket club out to the forest and there has been lots of exciting things to explore along the way, including baby snails, slugs and of course lots of blackberries! It has been lovely to be back in our familiar Putney forest, with the fallen climbing tree to play on and lots of nooks and crannies inspiring some brilliant imaginative role-play.
We have welcomed lots of new friends to the forest this week and all the educators have been really impressed with how the older children have looked after some of our younger starters. Our new friends have really loved being out in the wild on Putney Heath, collecting lots of treasures such as feathers, sticks and stones and having lots of fun in the mud kitchen. Water play has been very popular this week, with the children scooping out water from our big purple tub and mixing it with earth to make some delicious mud concoctions.
We have enjoyed some little adventures around our camp and the new children have particularly loved our adventures to the pond, where we have sat and looked out for fish and ducks. The children have been so excited when they have spotted any wildlife, calling out "Duck!" and explaining, "They want to say hello!". There have been some lovely moments this week, especially when we were visited by a robin who likes to drop by our camp from time to time. The children have all been very quiet, whispering, "Look, a robin!" and making sure we don't scare it away.
Groups of children have got very crafty this week making some collages using double sided sticky tape. After carefully peeling off the tape, the children stuck sticks, leaves and other natural materials to make some amazing pictures. Some children went further and even made some flags using sticks and leaves which then became props in their play.
Stories have been a big theme this week too as we settled into our new routines. The children have really enjoyed getting cosy and reading books with the educators and even making up their own hilarious stories which the educators have been scribing into our story scribing book. We plan to do more of this story scribing in the future and eventually have a go acting out some of the children's stories.
The children's fantastic imaginations have really impressed us. A group of friends became leopards prowling up and down the fallen climbing tree looking for prey. They all gave themselves different roles such as mummy, daddy and baby leopard and were very good at eating any educators who went into their lair! Some Little Forest Folk-ers even became hedgehogs for a whole morning, retreating into their hedgehog home when danger arose and pretended to eat spiky holly leaf snacks around the camp.
We have had such a lovely week, we hope you did too and have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Barnes