Kindness in the forest
Our week in the forest was quite special. Our Little Forest Folk-ers have been talking about their feelings and emotions during circle time, throughout the day and at home with their families. They tell us about the spectrum of emotions that they feel from when they wake up until they go to bed in the evening. It is truly mind blowing when we hear a 3-year-old using words such as ‘frustrated’ or ‘angry’ and ‘sad’ rather than the common ‘not happy’, but most importantly understand what those feelings mean.
We have been focusing on positive language and listening this week, as these are some of the enablers of positive relationships. Each day, we notice how much our children are developing empathy and they are more likely to be able to solve conflicts between themselves, but if they need support, our wonderful educators are always around to help.
We’ve started ending our days in the forest with some reflection time. The children are free to share their favourite moment/experience of the day and share with the group what they are grateful for. The educators choose an act of kindness that happened that day and they share with the children. These experiences are so enriching and powerful to both children and educators.
We have been celebrating the Chinese New Year - The Year of the Tiger. The children have enjoyed learning about legends, traditions, reading stories and making Chinese lanterns to decorate the forest. They’ve used baking paper, colourful strips of different materials, and pink camellia petals from the tree next to our camp. Using a glue stick, they’ve made patterns and abstract shapes which created fabulous works of art!
Our Little Forest Folk-ers also made masks using paper plates and string. We had little kittens, wolves, dinosaurs, and other fantastic creatures roaring and laughing around the forest. Imaginative play has been at the centre of our children’s play, and they create fantastic narratives and scenarios, impersonating magic creatures, superheroes, various animals and even monsters and aliens! The children had so much fun building a prison for our monster Ben, chasing him, and hiding from him in mysterious places (not at all in plain sight!)!
On wild cooking day, our explorers had such a wonderful time making Naruto rolls. With the help of educators, the children used peelers to get lovely thin strips of cucumber and knives to chop different coloured peppers for the centre. Then it was all down to finesse, children laid out their cucumber slices with ease, placing their peppers down the centre with a topping of cream cheese if they so wished and then it was down to educators to persuade them to wait until after forest school to eat their marvellous creations.
We’ve ended the week with lots of physical challenges at our construction area. The children really enjoyed exploring different ways to make the loose parts fit together and working collaboratively, they were able to carry heavy logs and planks from one point to another.
We hope you all have a fantastic weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham