We have had lots of physical challenges taking place in the Forest this week to keep our bodies moving and fill up our winter waterproofs with lots of lovely heat! We’ve had races, monster chasing, teacher catching and ramps made out of pallets to run up and down. This last activity was greatly enjoyed because it involved a big momentum building run up to make it to the top before holding arms out to carefully balance and turn around for a speedy return! This incorporated turn taking, listening skills and cooperation to stop a mass stampede and the older children became good at regulating their game and helping their younger friends to wait their turn.
We have had many requests for stories to be told and I love listening to my team read to the children and marvelling at their different styles. Story telling is such a worthy skill in our profession and just reading the words on the page will lose your audience in no time. Some Educators ask lots of questions, some do the voices adding lots of comedic drama with their expressions but all use their pace and tone of voice to keep the story flowing and captivating for the children. All of these things contribute so much to drawing in the children and helping to cement reading as a happy and exciting time and will help grow their interest in books for the future.
We have introduced coloured paper shapes for the children to play with on the craft benches, moving them around so that they could form different recognisable items like trees, ice creams, biscuits by manoeuvring them to different combinations and arrangements. They tried to copy each other as well as then extending their play later in the day by recognising and identifying shapes elsewhere on the site.
Clay was brought to the forest and the children worked to roll balls with their hands and stack them together for making their very own winter snowmen. We have been carefully labelling their little people and bringing them back to our indoor space to dry so that they can be painted next week as part of our Christmas Celebration Week of Parties!!
We have lots of activities planned for next week seeing as we cannot gather all the families together at Wimbledon like we would normally do and we are all very excited! I placed a very enthusiastic Hattie and Florence in charge of Christmas and they have come up with many activities so we are going to have so much fun!
Some of our friends have already said goodbye to us for the Winter break and so we wish them bon voyage and look forward to seeing them when they’re back.
Little Forest Folk
Fulham