Our Week in the Forest...
This week our holiday camp has seen the introduction of some new tools, some fantastic extended role-play and some palaeontologists at work! We also had all different kinds of weather including some very exciting thunder and lightning!
Heading straight to our camp at Rocks Lane the children took to finishing the planting of seeds in our vegetable patch. It is now complete with potatoes, carrots, cabbages, peas, leeks, courgettes and squashes! The children have been super excited as the first of the shoots have sprouted out of the ground! Now we are discussing with the children how we need to nurture and care for the seedlings as they are tiny and delicate but can grow into some wonderful food to eat!
One afternoon, we had thunder and lightning all around London and torrents of rain falling from above. The children seized this, recently rare, opportunity to collect water. They found containers of all shapes and sizes and proceeded to find the run off points from the tarps and tents to fill them. They discussed capacity, floating and sinking and how water flows while they transported the water to the guttering area. Here the children poured the water down a marble run style system that ended in a big splash. Some children explored how fast leaf boats could zoom down the contraption and conducted their own boat races!
We introduced the bow saw during a tool workshop this week. The children showed fantastic listening skills and extended concentration as they followed the important safety instructions when using a bow saw. As they cut through the log, the children commented on the way the saw dust fell to the ground and smiled huge smiles as their tree biscuit fell to the ground. Some children wanted to decorate them, others turned them into role-play props and badges and some simply wanted to take them home!
This week we have seen some children develop some ideas around dinosaurs and fossils. They began an excavation project in which they found some stones underground. They studied the stones and decided to try and look inside them to find fossils. Later they painted the stones and pretended that they were the bones of an allosaurus. Once dry, the children laid them out to try and recreate a dinosaur shape! The project continued upstairs as we provided the children with some dough so that they could make their own dinosaur bones!
Little Forest Folk
Barnes