Our Week in the Forest...
With some milder weather treating us with an appearance this week we have all felt the benefit in camp. The children are content to rest and focus on quiet activities for longer and the mud kitchen does not feel so chilly on those fingers! This has provided ample opportunity for the games to extend and broaden over time spent engrossed in their play to encompass their friend’s beside them or to explore textures and ingredients from the environment.
With our newly painted clipboards transformed into chalkboards we have been able to have mark making opportunities available whatever the weather and they have become a regularly requested feature in the forest. They are able to take them wherever they want without being restricted which is perfect for child led moments and you can often find a few of our children back in a favourite spot under a bush having come out to retrieve a board and chalk to play with.
Our paints have been put to good use with the children collaborating to repurpose large pieces of cardboard from our deliveries into colourful art using rollers, brushes and natural resources. This extended into a fantastic child led project to redecorate our benches into beautiful colours with the children choosing a single colour for each one and working together to paint each one.
To further explore colour, Gemma worked with some of the children to gather fallen leaves and flowers from the ground and showed them how to print the colours out onto paper by taking turns to bash them with the mallet.
We have noticed an animal theme running this week with the children becoming very involved with our animal guessing games and some of our older children starting to make up their own clues for us all to guess. We often play these kind of games as we are finishing our lunch with the group sitting in the circle and it allows the younger children to listen and join in with their peers and This was a great opportunity for them to learn some new animals and we showed photos on our phones of sea lions and pelicans, pointing out their features and describing what they ate and how they caught their food. Some of the children extended this game further by using one of our chalkboards and supported by Gemma to draw their animal for their friends to guess.
Little Forest Folk
Fulham