Chiswick - Rest, Recuperation and Remembrance

Rest, Recuperation and Remembrance

This week we have experienced an exciting change in our forest routine. Following on from our inset day which saw our educators exploring Chiswick gardens, we have a new base camp area! Our new campsite is not far from our previous area, but it will allow for something extremely important to happen in our forest - recovery!

While our little foresters are experts at respecting the trees and plants covering our site, lots of little feet and enthusiastic mud kitchen digging can, over time, have a negative effect on the forest. We already rotate between two areas every few weeks, but now we are so excited to introduce some new areas into the mix.

Moving to a new site also provides our little ones with an opportunity to test their knowledge of our forest school rules. If you see a rainbow ribbon, stop, and come back is something we all know, but sometimes we just get used to always being allowed in one area. When we come to a new place, our foresters must use their owl eyes to identify where the new boundaries lie.

We have also been reminding each other of the no picking no licking rule. As the days become wetter, we are seeing lots of beautiful and interesting looking mushrooms popping up all over the forest. Our friends have been amazing at using their eyes to observe without touching the fungi.

All week our little foresters have been exploring something called the Zones of Regulation. This is a strategy that uses four colours to help our friends identify their feelings and categorise them according to the colour. It has

🟢 Happy, calm, focused
🟡 Silly, Worried, starting to lose control
🔵 Sad, tired
🔴 Angry, out of control

We have created popsicle stick people with coloured sticks or faces to represent different feelings and created our own drawings and written down how we are feeling that day. As our friends learn more about the zones of regulation, they will begin to learn how to self-regulate and find techniques that help them to return to the green zone. This could be a cuddle to go from blue to green or perhaps something more complex.

On Thursday it was Remembrance Day, and we discussed what this meant with our friends. We talked about soldiers that lived a long time ago and how we would have a minute of silence to remember all the ways they helped people. Using a timer on a phone, we all gathered and were completely silent for an entire minute! The only noise was a dog barking, and our foresters were quite shocked that the dog had not taken part in our silence. Using red and black paper we all created our very own poppies and proudly wore them throughout the day. Coming all together to honour this moment was such a lovely way to end the week and we are so proud of how thoughtful everybody was.

We hope you have an amazing weekend and leave you with this iconic joke…

Why did the mushroom have so many friends? Because he was a fungi!

Little Forest Folk
Chiswick