Birds!
Our first Holiday camp was an amazing success, a great opportunity for children to come and share fantastic nature based experiences with us in our magical setting.
This week we’ve been focusing on birds, looking at bird’s feathers, listening to bird calls and talking about eggs hatching, after we saw a number of baby goslings around Chiswick House and Gardens.
The children were absolutely flabbergasted to have found a real bird’s egg fall from a bird’s nest in a tree in the forest! (The egg chose the perfect time to fall.)
This led to many questions about the Baby Bird and the Mummy Bird, and where they had gone. The egg still had some feathers around it and a big crack where the bird had hatched.
“The mummy bird took the baby bird and they flew away.”
The children all had the chance to hold our precious ostrich egg. They began to compare the ostrich egg to the egg that we had found in the forest.
“That’s a big one and that’s a small one.”
The children enjoyed making their own birds, taking feathers and googly eyes and sticking them to balls of mud, using sticks for legs.
We had more wonderful rain this week so there was of course plenty of splashing in muddy puddles, finding worms and slugs.
We created plenty of opportunities for the children to extend on their motor skills and challenge themselves physically, with climbing, obstacle courses, duck races, limbo, ball on a string and balancing.
Splashing, climbing, exploring, playing!
All in all, a wonderfully successful holiday camp week. We are all very excited for the Summer Camp!
Next Week in the Forest
Next week we will be focusing on music and sounds.
Next week will also be our ‘Week of Queens’. We will be celebrating the Queen’s birthday with a week of dressing up, tea parties and learning about our royal family history.
A Reminder to Families
Parents please aim to be at the Piccolo centre in the morning at 8:50am as we must leave promptly at 9am.
If for some reason you are running later than 8:50am, it would be helpful to ensure that your children are dressed in waterproofs on arrival.
As we expect the weather to be warming up we recommend you apply a layer of sunblock on your children in the mornings and we will apply more throughout the day as needed.
If you prefer us to use a personal sunblock, please let us know.
Here is a suggested Spring kit list for what your child should wear in the forest.
- Comfortable bottoms, i.e. leggings or tracksuit bottoms, not jeans
- Long sleeve shirt
- Thin jumper
- Fleece zip-up or jumper (preferably without a hood to fit under waterproofs)
- Socks
- Warm wellies
- A thin hat for early mornings and a sun hat for sunny days
- Labelled rucksack
- Labelled water bottle
- Labelled spare trousers & socks (more than 1 set of each plus underwear if potty training)
Please label your children’s items so as to minimize risk of losing items.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Have a lovely weekend
