Our Week in the Forest...
It has been an absolute delight to have welcomed so many lovely new children to the forest over the past few weeks, their settling in made all the easier by the heart-warming care and understanding that our older children have shown towards them.
Creativity and innovation have been an integral part of this week’s activities inspired by the ‘provocations’ that the educators have been introducing into the world of our setting, whether a new creative medium or a fascinating ‘mechanical’ knot to help expand upon the children’s growing interests, thoughts and ideas. The children have really enjoyed engaging in discussions about malleable materials and have loved using clay to create a whole array of imaginative structures inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy, with an occasional unicorn village or pizza thrown in for good measure!
Krishna’s variation of the ‘Garamond Friction Hitch’ has not gone unnoticed by the children who have wanted to understand why a stick is incorporated into the rope, they don’t miss a thing in the forest! Using ropes in imaginary role play, particularly for creating climbing structures, has become increasingly popular this week so it was wonderful to observe this fascination with how versatile a knot can become. This interest will undoubtedly take their already competent knot tying skills to a whole new level now that they are experimenting with ways to make knots slide along a rope…
As the season is starting to shift, the children have also been observing the changes taking place around them and have specifically noticed fruit on some of the trees. Of particular interest has been a quince tree from which some of the fruit had fallen. As always, the children were curious about what they were, and even more curious about what was inside. After feeling how hard the fruit was they decided that they would need something to help them, deciding upon one of the wooden mallets, so with many well-coordinated hits they eventually split open the quince. To their amazement there were so many seeds inside which inevitably lead onto more discussions and more seed related adventures! We cannot wait to see what next week brings and we hope you all have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham