Sunshine, sprinkles and seeds!
As our holiday camps come to an end, we have been taking a moment to appreciate just what a wonderful group of children we have had joining us over the summer holidays. Many returning faces and some new ones too, all coming together and making the most of their time spent at camp by sharing their ideas, telling stories, and forming some lovely friendships in the process. To add to this, our new settlers have done amazingly well getting totally stuck into whatever activity or game is underway. The walks into the forest have been slower as they take in all the giant trees, butterflies, clouds and wildlife around them.
Paints have been the favourite media to get creative with this week. It has been so nice to see so many colourful pieces of artwork hanging on the washing line to dry in the sun. This activity has been really popular with our new settlers this week, as they have had the time to mix colours together and experiment with various ways to apply paint to paper and big magnolia leaves that we always find next to the chapel building. All the while, they have been chatting and getting to know their new educators and peers.
Our week started as every week should…at the ice cream van! Many of the children queued up with their leaf money in hand ready to buy the ice creams on the menu. For two leafs per scoop, the ice cream was sold out in no time and the workers were rushed off their feet trying to make more as the day went on! Unfortunately, a group of baddies had other plans and instead of buying ice cream, they sped off with the wheels of the ice cream van. This was not good news and to solve the problem, a security guard was hired to keep a look out for any mischievous behaviour!
As ever, the mud kitchen has been a hive of activity with cakes, potions and restaurant quality food being prepared. Some of the children worked together to make individual pastries and cakes that were decorated with sprinkles. They soon discovered that by scraping pieces of chalk together like you would with a flint and steel, spark like sprinkles appeared and provided the perfect colourful decorations for their cakes. At the restaurant next door, tables were set up using logs and cable drums. The waiting staff came over to take the orders and share the specials of the day.
Just past the boundary to our site is a fruit tree that bears green pieces of fruit that smell a bit like apples. A few of the fruits had fallen from the tree which gave us a great opportunity to investigate it up close and try and get to the seeds inside. Using one of the educator’s phones, some research was done and everyone came to the agreement the fruit was a persimmon. A plan of our site was drawn out and a gardening area assigned using black pen. Later an area was cordoned off using pegs, the mallet and some bright Para cord. This was where the seeds of the persimmon fruit were shared out and planted into some egg cartons. The next day, one of the gardeners walked by and the children were excited to share what they had planted. Turns out, we had researched the wrong fruit because it was in fact a quince tree! We hope that despite our errors, we might still see some shoots starting to grow soon!
Talking of watching things grow, we have reached that point in the year where we say our last goodbyes to those children heading off to start their next adventures at school. It really doesn’t seem that long ago that we were welcoming these children in on their first days of forest school but boy have they come so far! We feel so grateful to have been able to watch them grow into kind, resilient, confident and super creative little humans! We really will miss them so much but we know they are going on to do great things at school and beyond and we are just so lucky to have been part of their journey.
We hope you all have a lovely bank holiday weekend and we will be ready to welcome you back for the new start of term next week!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham