Our Week in the Forest...
This week has brought a real change in the weather with strong winds causing some changes to our regular schedule. On Tuesday, with Chiswick House and Gardens closed, half of us headed off to the fruit and veg stall on the high street. On the way, we discussed what our favourite fruits were and what we would like to buy that we don’t normally have at nursery for snack. Mango was one fruit that we agreed would make a good addition to our fruit salad. At the stall, the children pointed out all the fruits they recognised and some that they didn’t. We then took it in turns to make selections, choosing a variety of fruits. Our selections included grapes, mango, plums, a blood orange, a melon, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. Back at our site we dived right in, using butter knives to chop our fruit into small pieces, learning how to half, and then quarter the grapes and comparing the colour inside the blood orange to a normal orange. With our fruit salad finished we couldn’t wait for afternoon snack! Meanwhile the rest of the children had taken a trip to the library where they shared some stories and joined in on the song and rhyme session the library was leading.
We spent the afternoon indoors, a change from our normal routine and the children enjoyed spreading themselves out in the hall; constructing with the den building kit, creating a large road from the puzzle pieces, ensuring that there were lots of round-a-bouts for the cars, sharing stories and building with Lego. We then had a dance off as we played musical statues to some well-known tunes before a game of ‘What’s the Time Mr Wolf’.
On Wednesday and Thursday, we took some adventure walks through Chiswick House and Gardens, finding some open spaces to play away from the trees. The children got busy building with sticks, creating their own dens, nests and homes. On Thursday, the rain bucketed down and the children were excited to be back splashing in the muddy puddles again. The puddles quickly became rivers before the winds picked up and we had to evacuate the gardens.
At Kew on Monday we were able to visit one of the smaller galleries where we found pictures of different places around the world and images of nature. We talked about what we could see in the pictures, the colours and the parts of the world where the images had come from. We have also started to find lots of new flowers growing around the gardens and compared the differences between the crocuses and the glory of the snow, which although similar in colour are rather different in regard to the shapes of the petals.
We have heard that some sunshine and warmer temperatures are on the way next week so we are looking forward to what next week brings!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick