Four seasons in one week!
We have seen warm winter sunshine, spring showers, torrential downpours and frost this week in the forest, it has been such an amazing time to watch the changes in the forest as different kinds of weather blew in and out of the camp.
With the heavy rain came the most wonderful puddles! We saw knee slides, leaps, bounds, hops, skips and jumps into and out of water and mud puddles in every location across Chiswick House and Gardens. Even after the children had been collected, they could be seen leaving with their parents enjoying more muddy puddle jumping in the car park, muddy balance biking on the slip road and soggy scootering through the rain. Little Forest Folk really does build a love of the outdoors come rain or shine!
Every morning we have left camp to explore the gardens. This gives us the perfect opportunity to learn in nature, to watch the animals we share the forest within their natural habitat and to make sense of the world around us. We took the time to marvel at the thundering waterfall, to watch the mist descend on the meadow and study the birds as they flew, swam and swooped around us.
In camp we loved setting up treasure hunts this week. There was a focus on 2D shapes as we hid then found triangles, parallelograms, rhombuses, circles, squares and hexagons around the site. We counted the sides, identified the colours and made shapes with the treasure once we had found them.
Parents even had their own version of a treasure hunt when the educators laid out a new rainbow ribbon trail for them to follow so that they could find the new camp once our earlier camp became waterlogged!
We experimented with hiding letters using the pictures to identify what the sounds might be, going on to spot the sounds we recognised in our names. For adventure play and risk taking this week we have loved climbing the rope ladder, swinging on the rope swing and taking turns in the hammock. It is amazing practice in turn taking as well as counting as we make sure everyone gets the same amount of ‘swings’ or minutes on the obstacles.
Singing has been a huge focus this week, particularly when we are waiting to go home. We have practiced our nursery rhymes, counting songs, name songs, action songs and forest favourites – learning new words, joining in, taking turns, choosing actions and deciding on the noises that animals or people make. Ask us to share some of them with you when we are at home this weekend.
What a fabulous forest adventure for us all!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick