This week in the forest we have been having lots of fun using our imaginations to make different objects and create new games. We have seen lots of dragon catchers, princess ribbons and even a trap to catch dinosaurs! The children have been exploring what they can do with just a piece of rope, seeing how they can tie knots, catch people and we even tried to have a go at skipping. The children were fascinated by their educators jumping over the rope and all wanted to have a go too. With perseverance throughout the week we now have some excellent jumpers who can manage jumping over the rope 3 times in a row! The children all cheered each other on as they had their turns and were very proud of themselves when they were able to make a jump.
The children also requested that with the ropes we could make a giant swing. So we had to make the biggest and best swing for them all to take turns on! The children timed each of their turns with a phone timer too and all counted down from ten to one. We have been so kind to our friends this week in the forest with turn taking and offering our younger friends some help by helping suggest what they can do to get on the swing independently. The children very quickly problem solved that they could sit on the swing without help if they took it to the top of the small hill and then sat on it. We have also been problem solving with how we can get across our row of logs the fastest. The children tried walking, jumping, running and climbing as different ways to get across and were quickly able to establish through our counting that a mixture was best as it depended on the size of the log we were going over. If it was just a little log we could run over it, but if it was a big one we had to climb and jump off of it.
We have had a range of weather this week from fog, to rain and to beautiful sunshine. We have been splashing in all the puddles and writing in and mixing up all the mud, we even went to see all the ducks sunbathing. Our winter adventure walks through the deep dark forest consisted of searching for pesky hidden zebras which sadly we could not spot so we settled by the river for some bird watching. We spotted swans, geese, ducks and coots! We were even able to match some of them to the pictures we had back in base camp. Some of the birds decided they liked the look of the children and followed us along the bank as we made new friends! We then tried to spot all the sneaky birds hiding around our camp in all their different hiding spots.
On returning to the Hogarth centre in the evenings, the children were overjoyed as we continued to explore the weather by making it snow indoors! We sprinkled shredded paper, exploring the texture and watched it fall gently to the ground when we threw it into the air. With all the fog and rain it’s starting to get dark a little earlier so we were also able to use torches to explore how lights are bigger and smaller when closer or further away and we have been able to see shadows and talk about what types of shadows we can make. We’ve heard all about how the children’s mummy’s and daddy’s can make animal shadows with their hands!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick