What a fantastic week!
The red team has been wowing us with their renditions of the Days of the Week song and they are also continuing to get better and better at the Months of the Year song too! They smash it every day with the Forest School Rules and can give good examples of what to do when we act them out with actions.
There have been many role-play emergencies this week that required calling the fire brigade to camp with the children charging up and down the site and manoeuvring around obstacles while responding to fires with their stick hoses. Fire building has also been a focus with the children gathering sticks from small to big and playing at gathering around the warmth.
The activity with the sticks and string has extended into this week from last week with the children growing more adept at winding and tying simple knots to connect their carefully selected and placed sticks and twigs.
A train was built as a collaborative project with all the children helping to carry, roll and drag logs, branches and sticks to create their vision. They were hugely proud of their creation and role-played driving the train, alighting and disembarking at stations and chatting about where they would go and their own life experiences of travelling by train.
One of the gardeners, we found out, had his birthday so every time he walked past he was greeted with a bellowing chorus of “Happy Birthday Chris!” Which he found very funny and he was really touched by. The children played at making birthday cakes and singing Happy Birthday because who doesn’t love a birthday party?
he green team has continued on a theme of den building with large and small scale structures being created all over camp. Two of our team made a tiny bridge across the river gully in the mud kitchen so that the ants could cross from one side to the other. They carefully selected twigs with similar diameter, snapping off ends to equal their length and worked together to carefully place them along the supporting structure underneath. This was a lovely example of the quiet focus and attention to detail that happens when their interest is piqued.
We love to incorporate numbers into our games in the forest and our children eagerly absorb them into their play. One of our green team decided he would set up shop and sell tools to his friends for their building project and selected a range of good sticks, laying them out carefully on display for his friends to peruse. He described each tool and even demonstrated its function as part of his sales pitch before naming his price. One of his friends was constructing a square out of sticks and was working with the measuring tape to source correctly sized sticks. He and his local shopkeeper worked together to find the right ones for the job, pretend money changed hands, and everyone was happy.
We have also continued to welcome a great many superheroes to our forest with daring rescues taking place everywhere we looked and a solid, hard working police force sweeping up any baddies that slip through the net and whisking them off to prison. We’ve never felt so safe in the forest!
As we continue to wave goodbye to some of our older friends as they leave forest school for the last time we wish them well and know that they will arrive in big school like the fireworks that they are.
Little Forest Folk
Fulham