Our Week in the Forest...
Giant Magnolia Leaf Fun!
Autumn has most certainly arrived this week with its chilly mornings and array of colourful leaves beginning to fall onto the ground! At Little Forest Folk Chiswick, without doubt, one of our favourite species of leaf has to be the giant magnolia.
The giant magnolia leaves are bigger than most of our children's faces and make fantastic resources for craft, collages and general decoration! We find these leaves at Kew Gardens and the children always tend to collect them as we walk into our chosen base camp for the day. This week, some of the children were using them as wings to fly, as well as ears, so that they could pretend to be an elephant! We collected a few of the leaves that had fallen and brought them back to our indoor base to use as canvases for drawings and also decoration for the room. It is lovely to see the creative juices flowing from the children when provided with a resource that is slightly unusual to their norm. It is also fantastic to see how a single resource can be so influential in children's play, learning and reinforces our ethos of the benefits of natural outdoor play.
With October sometimes being considered a spooky month, some of the practitioners have been setting up spider web obstacles in the forest using the ropes. Our Little Forest Folk-ers really enjoyed negotiating their way through the spider's web and trying their best to avoid Victoria, the spider whose web they were getting stuck in! She managed to capture a few children in her web who joined in as spiders helping her protect her web! The children could be heard giggling with laughter as they avoided the web and long arms of our hungry spider!
This week has also been fairly dry, so we were able to get out the hammock and swing. The children enjoy rocking side to side in the hammock and often play peek-a-boo using the hammock fabric sides to hide and then burst open to surprise the educators. Our new children have already shown great recognition of taking turns and being safe waiting outside the log circles to make sure they don't get bumped by the swing and hammock!
We hope you all have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick