Our Week in the Forest...
This week in the forest the children have embraced their wilder side and engaged in some wonderful role-play games and creative activities.
Our Little Forest Folk-ers have been pretending that they are big cats for a few weeks now but they decided to take their games into a new realm. This week they decided they were exhibits in a museum! They became a mechanical walrus, blue whale skeletons, sabre toothed tiger models and different types of dinosaurs! Once the exhibits were in place we were allowed to come and visit the museum to explore and find out more about some of the extinct animals.
Another day saw the children role-play a zoo. We created a big enclosure together to keep a rare collection of exotic and extinct animals including hyenas, prairie dogs, triceratops, a T-rex and a sabre toothed tiger. The children explored the idea of being trapped wrapping themselves up in ropes.
Having moved to a new site some of the children have been asking where our friendly robin has disappeared to. So we decided to make some bird feeders to entice the robin back. The children helped scoop out some coconut oil into a bucket. They then squeezed and squished the solid chunks with their hands to warm it up and melt it. The children loved the texture of the oil as it became all squishy and slimy! We then added lots of wild bird seed mix into the bucket and continued to stir and mix using our fingers until we had some very sticky and seeds! With great care and attention to detail, we then began to push and poke the seeds into the nooks and crannies of some pine cones. This process took quite some time but once finished the pine cone looked like a beautiful giant droplet of bird seeds. Some of the children decided to take theirs home whilst others hung them in a tree hoping to encourage more birds into our camp.
On one day the children got involved in a kite making activity. They learnt how to fold paper in a certain way and helped use a stapler to create a special plane kite. They then ran around the forest super fast making their planes fly up above their heads.
Some of our little explorers have been scientists this week as they tested materials to see if they were waterproof. They made predictions and carried out tests to see which objects repelled water and which didn’t. There was lots of discussion about why some things were waterproof and some things weren’t.
We hope you all have a lovely weekend and we’re looking forward to more exciting projects and adventures next week.
Little Forest Folk
Barnes