Our Week in the Forest...
It was our first day back at Kew Gardens on Monday and we made the long walk to the log trail to practice our balancing skills. Some of us were very confident leaping from log to log and we even tried to balance across some of the narrower logs by ourselves. We have also been working on our balancing skills back in the forest on our rope courses, attempting to stay on them as we completed the entire course around the trees.
Our Little Forest Folk-ers have been busy preparing for Halloween this week, we all enjoyed some pumpkin carving. With shopping lists in hand again this week some of the children set off to the shops to buy their pumpkins and ingredients for this week’s cooking class. We have really enjoyed these outings recently, particularly the opportunity to build on our literacy skills by recognising a range of letters and sounding out simple words. One of our ingredients was chives and we remembered that ‘c and h make ch’.
With the herbs high on the shelves, far out of our reach, Kellie selected a sample and asked if we knew which was which by looking at the leaves. We were correctly able to identify rosemary, mint and thyme and by process of elimination find the chives. In our cooking class with Nafisa the children made sardine pate, mixing all the ingredients together, and doing taste samples along the way, seeing how the flavours changed as each new ingredient was added. We were very happy with the finished product!
Our pumpkin carving was very successful and the children enjoyed scooping out the insides and drawing the faces on the pumpkins. We set all the seeds aside, amazed by how many were inside each pumpkin! With a little support in cutting through the skin we were able to use butter knives to finish the job. We talked about how we could put lights inside the pumpkins to create pumpkin lanterns. We also had some Halloween face and hand painting of skeletons, witches, and pumpkins to get in a Halloween-y mood!
We were amazed by the amount of rain that fell from the sky on Thursday. Before we had even arrived in the forest, puddles had started to form and the children were busy collecting and transporting the water, making their own muddy puddles and trying to scramble up the muddy slopes, slipping and sliding back down. As we sat down to eat our lunch, we were surprised by the quantity of rain that suddenly began to fall. Sheltered and dry, it was a sight to see as it collected on the tarps above and then ran off in big splashes around us. Suddenly our site was flooded with water and we had to head back inside to get warm, cosy and dry at our indoor site. With lots of activities to keep us busy we enjoyed a rare afternoon indoors.
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick