Art, music, imagination & loads of fun!
Hello everyone, we hope you are all well. In the forest this week, our children have been busy, busy, busy! We started off with adventure walks to the ‘rocket tree' where the children let their imagination run wild. Suddenly, they were astronauts blasting off around the planets and away from the sun “Or we can burn our ship!” some were saying. Our wonderful Ben then drew the solar system on the stage and the children learned about planets, stars, and galaxies! We’ve learned that there are volcanoes in Mercury and Saturn’s rings are made of small chunks of ice, rock, and dust.
Our Little Forest Folk-ers have made amazing art this week. Following up on the Chinese New Year celebrations, the children made lanterns with baking paper, PVA glue and string, and natural materials to decorate them. They learnt that in Chinese culture, dragons were kind and helped the other creatures cross the river and that was why the emperor liked dragons. This was, of course, the perfect cue to make their own dragons. Using big leaves and sticks, the children created amazing dragon heads using their fingers to dip in green, blue, yellow, and red paint and finally stick some googly eyes on it! Then off they went flying their dragons around our camp.
Ben brought to the forest some recycled paper with cuts that resembled a beehive, so the children made their own little beehive and drew bees to live inside after collecting nectar from some of the flowers in our camp.
The children have really enjoyed our musical instruments this week. Our lovely Florence has created the most beautiful resources for the children to use and learn about the different musical symbols and notes in the forest. They had such a lovely time exploring the images and trying to play the rhythms represented in the picture.
Our reading area is always popular, and we are all delighted to see the children look for books independently, read to each other and ask our educators to please read a book again and again! The children have access to different books every day as we aim to provide a wide range of stories and themes.
Mark making and counting has also been some of our children’s favourites lately. The children have become more interested in learning how to write their names and often ask an educator to show them how to write the letters of their name so they can copy. Especially when they find a special stick and want to take it home with them, so it doesn’t get lost in the forest, or when they want to take their creations home to show their families.
The warm weather has been kind to us this week, which allowed us to bring back water to the mud kitchen. What better way to celebrate than to find a big “wall’ as a target, make lots of mud balls and splash them against the wall at a super speedy rate! It was a delight to see their waterproofs get proper muddy again, but the best part was definitely seeing the huge smiles on their muddy faces and listening to the laughter echoing all over our forest! What did you do for fun this week?
Little Forest Folk
Fulham