Our Week in the Forest...
What a fabulous week of Stay and Play we have had! Glorious weather and lovely parents joining their children for some forest fun! Our children have enjoyed sharing their favourite spots in our new site as well as sharing stories, role play, mud kitchen cooking and building activities with their families.
We have enjoyed exploring clay some more this week and our designs and experiences are constantly improving. This week we enjoyed making “Claymen” by moulding small balls and stacking them together to create our own tiny snowmen. Some of us decided to use natural materials to decorate our ‘Claymen’ and found stones or seeds for the eyes and noses and even different leaves or grass for hair and clothing. We also had many other creations as children made boats or volcanoes and experimented with rolling, patting and squeezing the clay to see what different outcomes resulted in.
The children got particularly creative with logs this week making their own pirate ship perched on the side of the valley from large logs piled up. They climbed aboard and sailed off for a morning of adventure. In the afternoon, the same logs were rearranged into a larger square shape and this became a house. A request was made for a tarp to become the roof and with the tarp hung in place, the children used a second tarp for the floor, beginning to talk about the different rooms as they worked so happily together making amendments to their design. Early in the week, two children created their own rocket ship designs as well. It was lovely to see how each child approached their task in a different way. One child used large logs and piled them up in different ways to support each other, while the other child mapped out their rocket on the floor in a two-dimensional design using small sticks. The insides of the rocket were also clearly mapped out with different rooms and features marked by sticks and pinecones. What fabulous creativity!
We hope you all have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick