Our Week in the Forest...
This week we have been treated to two world events that are of interest to what we do here in the Forest. First, we had World Wildlife Day on Wednesday so decided to take the children for an extended adventure walk on the way to camp in the morning so that we could go wildlife spotting within the palace gardens. A huge tree stump that had obviously been at the mercy of the elements for a number of years provided a fantastic opportunity for bug spotting and our Little Forest Folk-ers were able to peer into all the nooks and crannies to see the life existing inside. We looked for birds in the shrubs and trees, spotting parakeets, robins and magpies and talked about where they live and what they might be doing as they flit back and forward through the air or hop around the branches.
Claudia told us about how she had seen the magpies starting to fly through the air carrying twigs in their beaks and she asked the children what they thought they might be doing. This prompted a conversation with our Little Forest Folk-ers about nest building and how it works and it is always great to hear the children share their own knowledge on a subject with their peers. The bird spotting continued through the day with children watching the robin as he whizzed back and forth into and around the yew hedge and some of us stayed as still as possible, listening with smiles on our faces, as the robin sang a beautiful song for us.
Earlier in the week, the loose parts area of camp was taken over by pirates with the dastardly dread pirate Karen urging on her pirate friends to take over the high seas! They gathered on their pallet ship and ran out on missions to grab treasure and bring it back on board, rushing with hammers to fix any leaks with cries of “We’re sinking! We’re sinking!”. Some of the pirates mutinied and formed their own rival pirate ship, with a great battle taking place with canon fire, shouting and sword brandishing. A hilarious game developed where they appeared to be trying to steal pieces of treasure from each other’s boats with lots of charging around and laughter. When we returned to our indoors site later in the evening, the children requested our pirate story book to be read while they ate dinner and they listened to the story of when pirates moved in next door.
World Book Day was our second big event this week so we made sure to bring even more books that normal into our site today so that we could set up a lovely reading space inside our tepee tent. We talked to the children about their favourite characters from the stories they know and they told all the people arriving in the tent to “shhhhhh, it’s a library”. We love how much our Little Forest Folk-ers enjoy books and we regularly see our older children take it upon themselves to read a story to their younger friends by following the illustrations and including lines or phrases that they remember. They laugh along with stories and talk about characters and events with such feeling that you can tell that their books are reaching deep into their imaginations and taking root.
We have been continuing with the train and railway theme that has been a focus for many of the children’s games over the last few weeks and they were fascinated by our All About Trains book. It’s very interactive with folding out pages and compartments to open to see what’s hidden inside different parts of the various trains. With so much interest flying about, a great many of our Little Forest Folk-ers took part in Katie’s ticket making activity. They practiced their scissor skills to cut strips of white paper to glue together with orange card so that they looked like the real thing. There were fantastic conversations flowing around as the children shared stories of journeys they had been on and times that they had used real tickets.
With the challenges that the cold, rainy weather brings it is always fantastic to witness our children’s resilience and ability to play and laugh throughout. We, as a team, work to play physical games like races and hide and seek to keep them generating heat inside their waterproofs and to get lots of blood pumping into little fingers and toes. Seeing the daffodils finally brightening the gardens, has given us hope that Spring is just around the corner but until the sunshine days are back, we will stick to splashing around in these giant puddles!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham