“Happy New Year!” could be heard ringing through the forest as the children welcomed each other back after their festive breaks. The gloomy weather forecasts never materialised, and instead frosty cold mornings soon warmed up as winter sunlight fought through any remaining clouds to make the ice melt and the frost twinkle.
We went on learning walks most days this week so we could feel the frosty grass crunch under our wellies and see the ice forming in our muddy puddles! Katie and Victoria have a favourite ‘mud slide’ hill which we visited. Normally we are allowed to roll down in our waterproofs to turn ourselves into muddy sausages! Instead, because of the frosty ground, we slid down on the hill our bottoms…. being enthusiastically pulled by our feet. The laughter could be heard from across Chiswick Park and visibly brought smiles to the faces of all the people we saw walking by.
In camp, to keep our senses alive, we explored the textures, smells and sounds of some exotic food ingredients. Victoria brought in a bag of natural goodies which included star anise, bay leaves, dried lime, dried flowers, organic tea bags and much, much more. We crushed them, pressed them, shook them, smelt them, felt them and made our own delicious aromas with them. I am sure you could smell the effects when you collected the children from the forest!
To keep our tummies warm we enjoyed hot lunches and hot drinks. Many of us were brave enough to try mint tea, and to our surprise actually liked the new flavour! Hot chocolate was of course as popular as ever as a winter warmer.
In the afternoons, while our younger friends slept, we did some lovely roleplay in the forest. Some days we went fishing with our fishing rods counting the fish we caught, other days we turned our den into a house and played mummies and daddies. One enamoured couple even announced their engagement much to our delight, perhaps we can arrange a forest wedding ceremony sometime soon.
Nature was all around us delighting us at every turn. We had a local woodpecker tapping at bark much to our delight and talked about the food he was looking for under bark and why he uses his beak to get his lunch! Our resident robins now know when to come and visit us so, if we sit really quietly, we can see them eating the little crumbs dropped from our snack. This led to us talking about how few berries and flowers we can see in the forest at this time of year and why the birds and animals might be more hungry
The older children loved using the sensory materials to make numbers and the ‘stick’ letters to find the sounds in our names.
It has been a fabulous frosty week in the forest and we hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick