Our Week in the Forest...
Well it was just lovely to have all our regular faces back from half term and to hear about the friends and family everyone had seen over their break. These moments are a great opportunity for the children to engage in lovely little conversations, comparing their own home lives to their friend’s and learning about what makes us the same and different.
Many of our younger children have started to make real moves towards forming their own friendships in the forest. They have regularly gathered together under the evergreen oak shrub in the centre of camp to gather bits and pieces to “make a picnic”, clearly enjoying the togetherness of the moment by making up their own chant “Pic-nic, pic-nic, making a pic-nic!”. This is a lovely moment of genuine collaboration instead of simply playing independently alongside each other as they all make contributions to the same pot, and play at offering and accepting food from each other. We have also seen more pairing off as our youngest children choose a particular person to play with in a more continuous way, often following each other from one activity to another showing us that they are more interested in the company of a friend than simply the activities themselves.
Superheroes have been featuring more and more in the forest, and one of our friends brought in a selection of masks that some children decided to wear. They posed dramatically and rushed around from place to place, one arm held in front as they flew; we’re really very lucky to have so many heroes on hand to save the day!
Our Little Forest Folk-ers have started registering themselves with named tree cookies at circle time, each coming forward to be supported in finding their own name and post it into the box. This is a lovely activity to build self-esteem and help them on their literacy journey which they love to take part in.
When the weather has allowed it, we have painted in the forest learning how to paint one side of a piece of paper before carefully folding it down the middle to see the beautiful patterns it prints when opened up again. Some Little Forest Folk-ers have chosen to transform their painting into kites, while others have chosen to take their paintings home in their bags. We have started hanging the children’s bags on a rope in the centre of camp so that we can support the children in building their feelings of ownership towards their own items. We support them at their individual levels to swap wet gloves for dry ones, to stow away found treasures and to attach their jackets to their bags if they ever swap for a high vis vest. It is lovely to see our older children take on this supporting role themselves and help their friends access their bags without feeling like they need to request help until it is truly needed.
As I write this on Thursday morning, we had all been very excited at drop off to see some fat flakes of snow falling in amongst the rain! There has been talks about building snowmen and throwing snowballs and we tried to catch some of the flakes on our tongues. We shall keep our fingers crossed that some of it might decide to stay on the ground.
Little Forest Folk
Fulham