Our Week in the Forest...
We have been loving the wintery weather this week at Barnes! On the way into our forest site, the children have been exploring frost and ice, stamping on the crunchy frost and icy puddles. They have experimented with mark making by tracing their fingers on frost which had collected on the wooden planks in the forest. The frosty weather has also inspired a project to make a piece of art using ice. We have been filling up balloons with water and food colouring to make some ice marbles. We discovered that it was quite tricky to fill the balloons with water, which led to some interesting discussions about water pressure and how it would be easier to fill the balloons using a tap. We also filled some Tupperware boxes with food colouring and water and added some autumn leaves to our water. We then put the boxes and balloons into the freezer and we are looking forward to creating our forest ice sculptures using our spheres and blocks!
This week we have had some brilliant adventure walks. On one adventure, we discovered that our old Gruffalo house had fallen down, so we decided to rebuild it using sticks and logs. Some children also made a smaller Gruffalo child’s house, which led to some great mathematical conversations about which sticks were longer or shorter. It was brilliant to see the children working so well together and communicating with each other to build their fantastic houses.
Our adventure walks have inspired some great role-play this week. The children had lots of fun hiding from ‘magic dragons’ and ‘puppy dogs’ and there have been brilliant games of hide and seek, with the children counting to 10 and beyond. We had ‘jungle walks’ this week too, with the children choosing to walk through tricky terrain and navigate around obstacles to find the best route. We had lots of fun walking through the thick jungle made up of cow parsley and looking out for any animals which might be hiding in the undergrowth!
This week, it was one of our Little Forest Folk-ers birthdays and we all sang Happy Birthday to our friend and then discussed ages of people and trees. As we had a tree cookie medal for our friend, we talked about counting the rings on the tree cookie to find out how old the tree was. The children then had lots of fun looking at logs around the forest, having a go at counting the rings and discussing how old the tree might be.
We hope you have had a lovely week too and we cannot wait to see what next week brings!
Little Forest Folk
Barnes