Our Week in the Forest...
This week in the forest the children have continued to develop their mark making skills. We have had a number of activities where the children have been able to write, colour or just begin to enjoy holding pencils and crayons by scribbling whatever their imaginations desire.
The Jolly Postman was an exciting new literary addition to the forest and the children loved choosing the letters and reading them. Once they had read the book, those who wanted to then set about writing their own letters. Some chose to write to parents, others to friends, some wrote birthday cards and we even had some going to Australia for Chelsey! It was lovely to see how the children took such ownership over the activity in how they were designed and who they went to. The children have become so confident and love using their initiative. Not only did they choose who to send them to but the design of each letter was completely unique; some decided they wanted to glue leaves and flowers to the front while others put their letter on bark and colour over it to give a different texture. Just by providing the stimulus, these brilliant little children are then able to go off independently to create their own masterpieces.
We have also had clipboards tied around trees this week where children can take a break from running, climbing, jumping or swinging to write, draw or colour instead. We love when our children experiment as this is the very way they learn and this has resulted in our log circle having had a bit of a makeover too!
We also made and decorated our own aeroplanes this week. Maybe it’s being on a flight path and seeing aeroplanes overhead every few minutes, or maybe subliminally all the falling leaves had the children pondering the idea of aerodynamics, but when one child decided they wanted an aeroplane to fly it wasn’t long before a number of other children decided on the same. Before we folded these into shape the children of course wanted to decorate them. This meant our pencils and felt tips came out once again and after a short while it was hard to walk around base camp without being flown into by a paper aeroplane.
We have loved seeing how excited the children are about mark making and how quickly they are developing in this area but this is of course just one of the many areas they’ve been working on this week. We look forward to seeing what interests and ideas the children bring with them next week. Have a lovely weekend!
Have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham