Our Week in the Forest...
Having spent the beginning of the week exploring our new nursery location in Fulham Palace Gardens the children have finally decided upon how they wanted it to look. So, in small groups they were eager to help bring over our ‘furniture’ from our previous home. Off they went with some educators to collect tree stumps, logs, planks and cable drums. It was like a scene from Fantasia as the children rolled the drums down the path, helped each other to carry the planks and loaded up materials onto the trolley. Piece by piece our valuable loose parts arrived and were placed around the forest for the children to integrate into their new space and they have really taken ownership of the gardens. It was quite amazing to observe the enthusiasm, motivation and determination when the children worked together, they definitely made light work of what was a pretty big job!
And it didn’t stop there, their previous ‘mud pit’ had been an essential resource for their mud kitchen but moving a ton of topsoil was a little beyond our capacity, so we decided that we would need the help of Chris the gardener with his digger. Once they had built the boundary with suitable logs we arranged for Chris to pop over with his tractor to collect two big scoops of topsoil for the new location. The children were really excited to see it all come together, directing Chris where to place the soil and were particularly impressed with his driving skills as he negotiated the forest, squeezing through the narrowest of spaces.
Books and storytelling has also been a major theme this week, so in between making some very effective traps the children have been sharing lots of literature together. Bella also had the idea to ask all the educators to bring in their favourite children’s books and the children then had to guess which book belonged to which educator. There were a few tricky ones but most had a clue in the title or character, who’s favourite was ‘The Koala Who Could’ and I wonder who brought in ‘Katie Morag’s Adventures’?
It has been a delightful opportunity to have the group thinking about why we like particular books and how the stories sometimes relate to our own interests and lives. As part of these discussions the children started to also guess their friend’s favourite books, so we have asked the children to think about their favourite book and if they can bring it in for us to share next week.
If you can ensure that your child’s name is written in the book that would be really appreciated, we are all really looking forward to finding out what everyone’s favourite book is next week…
Little Forest Folk
Fulham