Our Week in the Forest...
Collages, a theatrical performance and a huge discovery!
This week has been a very creative one! The children have been very imaginative with the arts and crafts areas we have been setting up in the forest. One day we brought in two blank canvases with some PVA glue. The children began the day by collecting the resources they wanted for their collage and then used their found natural objects to decorate the canvases. They enjoyed it so much that they asked to make their own to take home, so used card to make their own pictures! The children have also enjoyed up-cycling our cardboard boxes to make beautiful paintings.
We have also been enjoying a lot of stories being told by our children. Some of the educators have been recording and writing them down so that the children can see their words transcribed. It’s a process called story scribing and is part of a practice we do called Helicopter Stories. The next step once we've written the stories is to perform them. So, using a groundsheet for a stage and tarps as the theatre curtains, the children spent one afternoon performing their tales. One of the tales was about princesses, dragons and castles! The children were able to take on these roles and we had even prepared resources such as crowns and we played medieval music on our speaker to set the scene! It was great fun and lovely to see our children's stories come to life.
Halfway through the week we also had a fascinating discovery of an enormous dinosaur-sized egg! One of the educators had found it on the way to our base camp and brought it in to show the children. We believe it to be most likely a swan’s egg but we asked the children where they thought it had come from. We had a good range of guesses mainly birds, but some children guessed it was from a crocodile or dinosaur! The children were all amazed by the egg and it created a real sense of excitement and wonder. It's so exciting when the forest provides us with these unique moments, inspiring our children to be investigators and biologists!
We hope you all had a lovely week too and have a wonderful weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick