Our Week in the Forest...
Homemade play dough and our environmental footprint!
This week Georgia has been very artistic and has been bringing out the face paints to the forest. The children have been taking it in turns to either have their hand or face painted. We had rainbows, lions and even kangaroos being painted on the children's hands and one child transformed into a panda! The children were all very patient waiting for their turn and we had a great variety of ideas. We will be sure to open Georgia's painting bar again in the near future.
The children have also been experimenting with making their own play dough. We did this activity after returning back to our indoor space one afternoon after a deluge of rain which we had had all day! The children were able to dry off and change out of their clothes before we began making the dough in a large mixing bowl. Miranda and Victoria started by presenting the children with a big bowl of flour. They then would add different ingredients (such as oil and food colouring) allowing the children to take turns to mix the dough. Once the play dough had been thoroughly mixed and then kneaded, the children were then able to play with what they had made! The activity allowed for lots of conversation on quantities, textures and materials.
At Kew this week, we have enjoyed looking inside the Princess of Wales Conservatory at the cactus’ and animals! We were looking at the large fish, poison dart frogs and we tried to spot the lizards but they were hiding from us!
From time to time, we like to consider how long we have spent at our Chiswick House and Garden's basecamp and consider the damage we are causing by our footfall in the area. Having been at the current site for around 6 months now, the team decided it would be best to return to our basecamp nearer to the car park entrance which has had time to rest. We explained this decision to the children and it was nice for us to return to our previous basecamp and see the changes to the environment, such as new branches of elder growing. The children were all very excited to be back in our old environment!
We hope you too have had a lovely week and we cannot wait to see what adventures we will be having next week!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick