Green thumbs & oatcake crumbs
At the centre we’ve been filling the playground with some new resources and activities for lots of fun! Long tapestry paper pinned to the fence has served as a platform for creativity and expression from our budding painters. Gigantic Jenga blocks have also unlocked the curiosity of our burgeoning engineers, seeing which formations can create the tallest structures, making bridges from one structure to another and bringing in the demolition team when it’s time to tidy up. On that note pulley systems have been popular, introducing some physics and sparking play involving trajectory schemas.
On the cusp of Easter (arguably tied as the tastiest holiday along with pancake day) our children have been hard at work crafting bespoke cards for their families featuring beautiful eggs, magic bunnies and springtime flowers. We’ve also been hiding things around the forest in the spirit of egg hunts. Dinosaurs, animals and coins have been hiding in the oddest places, but by using positional language clues our finders and lookers always catch them in the end.
Stories have spring-boarded plenty of learning opportunities - “The Ten Little Pirates” have led to lots of memorisation (our children know it front to back now!), counting both ways and thinking about simple sums, for example, “If we started with 10 pirates and 3 fell in the sea how many are we left with?”. On our adventure walks we noticed that the only things the birds like more than our seed mix are our oatcake crumbs!
This week across both camps we have started to make use of our kindly donated stock of egg cartons. Recycling through gardening and repurposing has been so much fun! Our little farmers have delicately filled them with fertiliser, chosen a variety of vegetables and flowers and gently pressed the seeds into tiny, divided beds. With a layer of topsoil, and a sprinkle of water our crops are ready to flourish! Some are being kept safe at the nursery so we can all watch their progress, and some have been sent home to live in gardens and windowsills. This has been so popular that some children have taken it upon themselves to lend a helping hand to the trees by cracking open chestnuts, planting and watering them in the forest!
We hope that you all have a wonderful Easter break!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick