Our Week in the Forest...
It has been wonderful to welcome everyone back to the forest this week after the Christmas break and has made us very excited for all the adventure that 2020 will bring. As we started getting back into the swing of our forest adventures the children have been showing new interests in their learning.
This week we fully immersed ourselves into the forest and what it can offer us. We started by taking some of our children on an exciting first adventure walk of the year. This not only helped us in settling back into the Chiswick grounds but lead us into a discovery of various instalments scattered around the gardens. From giraffes, rhinos and scary dinosaurs to giant flowers, children were able to spot many sculptures that the garden put up for this month. Many of us used this as an invaluable chance to talk about differences between the sizes and colours. This was also an amazing photo opportunity and a spotting game.
Throughout the week we focused on spending lots of our time at basecamp to explore new ideas for learning. One of our explorations was a ‘hanging bridge’ set-up where children could cross from one side of the forest to the other by walking on wobbly logs and holding onto two pieces of rope hanging on each side of the bridge. We had some children who completed it in a blink of an eye and some that focused on making their friends wobble on the logs that resulted in everyone falling down. This ended in lots of laughter as children then tried to make themselves fall and join their peers on the ground. This was a great challenge of coordination, balance and movement, as well as team-work skills being reinforced.
To spark our imagination, our educator Victoria worked with the children to make various animals out of clay. Children quickly joined in and started creating monsters, dinosaurs and various forest creations. The conversations and various stories started to emerge amongst the children whilst projects progressed and developed.
In between being active and creative we have been reading stories in the forest and tried to spot as many letters and numbers we could recognise in the books. This inspired us to see if we could spot any objects in the forest that resembled the letters from the stories.
All in all it’s been great to be back in the forest and we are ready to take on lots of adventures and to learn, imagine and play!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick