Our Week in the Forest...
This week our adventure walks have started from the moment we walked through the gates of Chiswick House and Gardens. The children made a decision on where they wanted to have their morning snack and where they wanted to stop and play on their way into the gardens. There is always so much that captures the children’s attention and it is nice to be able to stop and share these small moments with them, such as the cormorant spreading his wings to dry on the lake, the shadows our bodies make in the sunshine or testing our physical skills as we navigate over fallen branches in the forest. There are always bugs to find, hills to roll down, pinecones to collect and buds starting to grow. It is lovely to hear the children’s voices as they comment on the world around them. “There’s so many birds today!”, “All our plants grow in summer” and to have those conversations that dig deeper into their understanding to draw connections between the seasons, the weather and their experiences. This week has been a reminder for us to slow down and stop to smell the roses.
We had the tools out again this week and Otis and Tom helped us to peel elder branches with potato peelers and saw off small cylinders of elder, poking out the pith inside in order to leave a hollow tube that we could then thread through. This was a great opportunity for us to discuss how to keep safe when using tools and to develop our fine motor skills.
We have built on our mathematical skills this week through games with numbers, such as Dino Dominoes and Dice games and are getting quite confident in recognising the dots on the dice as numbers and counting out objects to match the number before adding the different dice numbers together to get a total. Some of us have even been practicing recognising and drawing 2D shapes as well as using shapes to create Tangram pictures.
It is lovely to see the improvement in our children’s drawing and writing skills as they create recognisable images and even make attempts at writing some of the sounds. They decided to write a label for their picture by sounding out “Simon’s minibus” after being dropped off at Kew by Simon. They used an “s” and an “m”, sounding out Simon. We even enjoyed some games of “I Spy” using sounds and our Little Forest Folk-ers are really improving with their ability to hear and say the initial sound in a word and guess an object beginning with that sound.
We hope you all have lovely weekends and we cannot wait to see you all next week for our next big adventure!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick