This week in the Fulham camp we have been focusing on Physical Development and Expressive Art and Design 🎨🍂
Monday:🕺
On Monday we had our new favourite tunes on repeat, the magical world of Danny Go, whose dance routines are a big hit on camp. Our bigger adventurers have been a wonderful inspiration to our smaller family and have been helping them with mastering rhythm within their dances. Particularly in our favourite song, The Wiggle Dance, there is a complicated beat and movement pattern which we have been focusing on. We have been listening out for each beat and moving our hands in response, supporting our early phonological awareness and getting ourselves phonics ready!
Tuesday: The Great Wave 🌊
Today we celebrated all things Art as part of our fortnightly planning focus on the development of “exploring colour and mixing” and "using drawings to represent movement or loud noises”🖌️🎨 We chose three famous paintings to explore, analyse and recreate, all of which we displayed in our ‘Art Gallery’ structure. We studied the ‘The Great Wave’ where we discussed how we could see movement through the still image. “Do you think the wave was moving? Do you think it made a sound?”. We studied the Mona Lisa, considering her mood and her expression, “Which colour do you think she might be feeling? What makes you think that?" (Zones of Regulation). We studied “Scream” and discussed and created the sound we think the character would be making.
Our Little Forest Folk-ers had the opportunity to decorate wooden birds with various techniques and materials, as well as observing and re-creating the famous artworks with pens and paints. Maria led a colour mixing workshop, where we explored primary colours and how when we mix these together, to make our secondary colours. Our little explorers used coloured water and pipettes to experiment and create new colours. After completing their palettes, they got to use these colours to create their own masterpieces. ⭐️
Wednesday: Welcome to The Louvre 🖼️
On Wednesday we introduced our Art Gallery set up, where we built the famous Louvre gallery right here on camp - with crates, palettes and a whole lot of magic. Our adventurers got to explore the gallery and make their very own pieces to add to the display. We explored methods like collage, pointillism and fine line drawing.
We supported the development of patience, accuracy and motor control with games of bowling across our camp stage. We set up bowling pins and a formation of wooden owls and watched as children learnt the skill of an ‘underhand roll’, paired with some great hand-eye coordination to throw the ball across the course. 🎳
We also strengthened our vestibular systems with some ‘tight rope walking', shuffling our way across raised beams in a challenging balance course made from crates and repurposed panelling.
Thursday: Can you see a rainbow? 🌈
On Thursday we experienced some unpredictable weather, sunny for a moment and then pouring down the next! 🌧️ Our Little Forest Folk-ers enjoyed the damper ground in the mud kitchen which makes digging a whole lot easier and many mud pies were made. Children rejoiced at the idea a rainbow could be brewing, identifying that this was the perfect weather for one. We used our colourful sensory mesh cloths and made a long cloth-caterpillar which looked just like a rainbow. All of our adventurers took hold of a section of the material and we headed to the Walled Garden like a winding rainbow - on the hunt to find some colours in the sky 🌈
We continued our Art & Design journey with another trip to ‘The Louvre’, where of course the famous Mona Lisa was displayed. This time, it seemed to be a ticketed event, (possibly a private viewing for some of our emerging artists on camp) and children sat at the cash machine scanning and selling tickets into the gallery space. We then used repurposed paper, imagery of faces and cut out shapes to create our own abstract Picasso’s 👨🎨
Friday:🥛
On Friday we explored colour mixing with a fun milkshake making activity. We got our base ingredients: milk, bananas and strawberries, and asked our adventurers what they thought would happen when these colours mixed together, discussing the descriptive words of ‘pale, pastel, light’ to describe different shades of our well known colours. We find our little ones display such pride and pure enjoyment when tucking in to treats they have a big part in making, and enjoy watching how effectively they can follow a step-by-step process like cooking 🧑🍳
Little Forest Folk
Fulham