Our adventure walks have brought us many exciting discoveries and good times this week. The Robins discovered that the large, ancient hollowed-out tree stump that they loved to play in had finally broken apart! The huge sections were lying in the grass and they were fascinated to investigate all the nooks and crannies that had been made by the combination of weathering and little forest beasties. Claudia spoke to Lucy, the Head gardener, and asked her if we could have one of the sections for our site. After heaving it onto the trolley and taking it to camp it has been placed at the edge of the Nest and the children worked together to gather other sticks, logs, leaves and soil to transform it into a bug hotel. They identified rooms, stairs and lifts in the natural features of the wood and even decorated it with flowers.
We have a lovely tree next to our camp that has started bursting forth with bright pink flowers again and the children have been gathering them to play with or carefully stow in backpacks to take home. We use thin twigs to thread through the centre of each flower to connect them together, pluck the petals and lay them out on logs to create patterns or use them to practice counting. They are added to soups and pancakes in the mud kitchen or as decorations for special places and sometimes they are being taken to a quiet spot, away from noisy games where they can be closely studied in peace, stroking the petals, using careful fingertips to move the stamen, maybe giving it a sniff. These are one of my favourite moments to catch, when one of our kids is deeply immersed in their investigation and are so calm and peaceful but clearly actively learning.
Dinosaurs are always a hot topic amongst our Little Forest Folk-ers and there have been conversations and role play games on this theme all week. It is always incredible to hear just how much dinosaur related know-how the children can remember, and they do not have simple names! They have been sharing their knowledge with each other and comparing facts remembered from their own dinosaur books at home. We play describing games where we give verbal clues, identifying distinguishing features so that they can try and guess which dinosaur we are, and they are amazingly good at it.
We have also been hearing about some favourite shows that are watched at home and role play games have been springing up as they form little teams to play at Transformers, Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig and Ninjago. This can also be a catalyst for new friendships to form as mutual interests are discovered in their friends.
Pete the new Assistant Head gardener gave us a football and this caused great excitement. Two of our girls were particularly persistent in playing on our camp with great footwork and concentration on display. With our camp being surrounded by the crocodile river, if the ball went out the children had to call for one of us to fetch it back so they quickly developed skills in stopping and turning the ball if they reached the edge. This often resulted in a clump of children at the edge, giggling and franticly scrabbling to get the ball in time before it went out. It was really good fun!
We have had a spectacular volume of rain so puddle play has taken up a huge part of the week, running through them, kicking the water to see how far the splash can go, investigating colanders and sieves, pouring, scooping, transporting and decanting between containers. A good puddle can support a huge range of play and learning and it’s a real opportunity for us, as educators, to expand on it in the moment in line with the children’s play; making rivers and waterfalls, investigating which items will float or sink, constructing bridges or dams.
We are due some snow at the weekend and early Monday morning so please send as many extra gloves as possible and make sure to layer up legs as well as top halves so that the children can sit on snowy ground or cold logs to play or eat their lunch without getting chilled.
We hope you all have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham