Flying into space!
We hope you’ve all had a week as fantastic as we did in the forest! Starting off indoors on Monday due to the stormy weather, going through hail, wind, and rain midmid-week, and ending with a fabulous sunny day. The children had such a wonderful time exploring the changes in the environment. They splashed in muddy puddles, tried to catch specks of dust in the sunlight and flew their kites and rockets in the wind.
We usually start our days in the log circle singing the ‘hello’ song, reminding everybody of our Forest School rules, talking about oral hygiene and sharing how we are feeling. The children have absolutely embraced the zones of regulation and are more able to manage their emotions and self-regulate when they need to without much interference from an educator.
We have continued our activities around the space theme this week as it was a huge success last week and the children have been so interested in learning about planets, stars, galaxies, and the solar system. Our Little Forest Folk-ers have been fascinated with some of the sensory activities such as making moon sand - using flour, baby oil and food colouring. They enjoyed smelling the wonderful fragrance that filled the air as they were mixing the ingredients, and they spent a long time playing with the sand afterwards. It was incredibly soothing and therapeutic!
The children made rockets out of paper and paper cups and decorated them with sugar paper and pens. They stuck a piece of string to the rocket with Sellotape and spent the afternoon flying them around the galaxy! Some of our children built a massive rocket with the magnets and it was incredible teamwork, placing each piece carefully on top of each other trying not to knock it over! It did come down a couple of times, but with the children’s perseverance and creativity, a new rocket was built, and each was more amazing than the last!
We even had a space rocket in the construction area and our own Mars rover for the children to drive on Mars! It needed a bit of maintenance, but our little engineers were prepared with a toolbox to fix the wheels and other bits.
Mark making has also been very popular this week. The children drew circles in the mud with sticks, they used chalk on the logs and pallets, and some practised some letters with a pen on cardboard. They were so proud of their work and immediately wanted to put it in their backpack to take home and show their mum and dad!
The children took advantage of the muddy forest and made an incredible volcano! It was such an attraction! All the children and staff gathered around Zainab as she poured the baking soda, food colouring and finally, vinegar… after a couple of seconds of suspense and some magic words - ‘Iggity, zaggity, zoom!’ an eruption of bubbly lava of different colours came sliding down the mountain. It was epic and each child was choosing a different colour trying to guess what the mixture would be like!
We hope you all have a wonderful weekend exploring!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham