Happy days in the forest at Fulham!
Our Little Forest Folk-ers have been so incredibly happy this week at Fulham! The sun shone most days albeit the cold, but the children enjoyed wearing their amazing hats and colourful gloves most of the time. With so many layers on, the children can find it challenging sometimes, but what a great opportunity it’s been to practice the ‘flip’ with their jackets and trying to put the gloves on by themselves!
Our week started peacefully, with the children enjoying various activities using natural materials such as leaves, sticks, pinecones and stones. They also enjoyed using paint and PVA glue to stick colourful feathers, cardboard, and other bits together to create beautiful art pieces. We even had a yoga session with one of our play workers one morning!
Ben and Hannah have been doing set up this week and each day they prepared a wonderful scenario for the children to explore and make it their own. We had an incredible pallet maze which offered the children the opportunity to problem solve and extend their play and learning by adding and removing planks and branches. We also had several obstacle courses, which have been super popular lately. The children challenged themselves each time they had a go and it really showed how much they are growing in confidence, independence, and resourcefulness.
Using loose parts to build things is an excellent activity for the children to work together and find ways to make things work, experiment and work on their physical skills. It is also an important part of their social development, they negotiate and talk to each other about what to do, which parts they need, etc. Their language and communication skills improve, and they are much more capable of resolving conflict and finding solutions to problems.
Florence and Pippa have been working on focused activities in numeracy and literacy. Our little adventurers have been interested in letter puzzles, memory card games, mark making and counting. Our amazing educators have been supporting the children and making sure that their interests and needs are constantly being met in the forest.
Storytelling and reading have been their favourite this week! We have an amazing selection of books and are constantly adding to our library (depending on the children’s requests) and our educators generously contribute every week with books they bring from home. Emily and Nafisa are often seen with a book reading stories to a group of children. Some stories are so captivating that it becomes a challenge to pause for a loo visit or a water break! Our children love telling their own stories and creating fantastic characters in their narrative and imaginary play. From dragons to Mr Nobody in Nobody’s Land, Robots, to Villains and Superheroes, our children never stop to amaze us!
This week, we celebrated Thanksgiving and the children had an amazing time decorating turkeys with fabulous feathers. In the next few weeks, we will be celebrating Hanukkah and Christmas. We are very excited to introduce lots of festive activities, decorations and even a visit from Santa in the Forest! We can’t wait to share all of this with our Little Forest Folk-ers!
Have a magical weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham