All Aboard!
We have a huge love for transport-based play in our Morden forest! A small group of children sat down with practitioner Teo and a pen and paper, to plan out a design for a train, counting how many wheels we’d need, how many carriages, and other things that we’d need, like “an engine” and “big windows” and “a driver!”. Once the children were happy with their plans, they chose to use the wooden building blocks to bring their creation to life! We spoke about our plans being “2D” on paper and “3D” with the blocks. It was great to the children develop their activity so independently!
We enjoyed getting creative painting milk bottles to make different tools in the forest, like watering cans and digging spades. The children loved to mix different colours together and paint over the labels to make “my new label”. We also made paint stamps out of the bottle lids, making lots of different coloured circles on one of our forest posters! It was a great opportunity to talk about reusing materials with the children and getting the most out of the things we use in the forest!
The mud kitchen was very busy this week, the children have been enjoying transporting the sand from the sand pit to make ‘pancake mix’! The children experimented with making different textures and consistencies by adding water, mud and woodchip to their pans. This sparked lots of conversations about what kind of pancakes we eat at home “Blueberry!”, “Chocolate!”. We also had fun finding different ways of making the circle shapes, using pot lids, carving circle shapes with sticks, and squishing with their hands!
One of the most popular activities this week has been the ‘goop tea party!’ The children were given different colours of corn flour goop, pots, bowls and little cups and saucers to have their own tea party! They really enjoyed the interesting texture and trying different ways to move the goop from one cup to another. Some used little spoons, some poured from one to the other, and some got nice and mucky by using their hands!
We’ve also started a project to make our own little solar system model, using papier-mache! The children loved to rip up small bits of paper, dip them in glue and cover a balloon to make the ‘sphere’ shape. We’ve hung it up in a tree so the children can come back to it through the day to check if it is dry yet. We are excited to paint it with green and blue to make our globe! We will continue with this activity and see how many planets we can make!
We have had such a lovely week, we hope you have too and have wonderful weekends!
Little Forest Folk
Morden