Forest Safari!
Our week in the forest at Morden has been full of conversations about animals this week!! Nature and wildlife has been a great interest for our Little Forest Folk-ers, and the children and educators have been teaching each other lots of new cool things about the animals in our world! Following on from our ‘shark school’ play last week, the children got involved with a crafting activity where they made their own ‘sting rays’ using paper plates, long string for the tail, and water colours! We were talking about mixing the different colours and making ‘swirly whirly’ shapes on the backs of the sting rays, and decorated our forest space by hanging them up after we were done playing with them, ready to take them down when we wanted to play with them again!
Our explorers have also been developing their interest in transport, moving away from cars this week, and focusing on planes instead! The children used their fine motor skills to make their own mini-planes, using a wooden clothes peg and lollipop sticks attached to the middle. The children practiced writing their own names and decorating on the wings, and used them in their imaginative play for the rest of the afternoon! So lovely to see how creative our team and children can get with just a lollipop stick and a clothes peg!
We had a fabulous tools activity where the children practiced hammering nails into a log. This was an activity that was very popular during the summer, and it was great to see how well the children had remembered the forest rules around using tools and keeping each other safe. It was also fabulous to see our newer children following the rules so well too! Respecting our boundary flags, and listening to the educators about waiting their turns and moving slowly and safely. We can’t wait to put these skills to use in to more adventurous tool activities!
The children have loved using their fine motor skills to sew show laces in and out of different letter shaped cards! They picked out their own letters, most little ones chose the first letter of their names, and spoke about what other words started with that letter as they were practicing their sewing!
To finish the week, we’ve been so excited to go bird watching at the front of the forest! Our children had noticed parakeets flying around our big oak tree, hopping in and out of the bird house we have placed up there. We brought over our binoculars and stayed low to the ground ‘so we don’t scare them away!’ Our adventurures found it a little hard to count how many there were, because ‘they move so fast!’ but after some patient waiting and careful watching, the children noticed that there was one bird on each of the big branches! “Four parakeets on 4 branches!” We can’t wait to keep our eyes peels to see what other animals pay us a visit!
We hope you have a wonderful weekend, we are excited for more adventures next week!
Little Forest Folk
Morden