Forest Tea Party!
We always love making new food and drinks for us to try in the forest, especially when we make it on the fire! The children joined us at the fire circle to boil up some water and add our mint leaves that we've been growing in our herb bed! The children talked about the 'bubbly water' as we watched the pan get hotter and hotter. We also spoke about how the water was changing colour, the children noticed that the water was turning more of a green colour as we stirred the leaves up in the hot water - and of course, we talked about how yummy it smelt! "It smells like toothpaste!" We all enjoyed our fresh mint tea with our afternoon snack, and of course gave each other a big 'cheers!' before we drank to remind ourselves how hard we worked to make it so yummy!
One of the forest favourites this week has been the new swing we've set up in the back of the forest near the water play. This has encouraged some really cool inventive roleplay from the children, as they pretended to be 'superheroes' and gave a 'superhero spin!' on the swing! The children have done a wonderful job of understanding and respecting the new boundary that we've put around the swing using the rainbow ribbons. One of our forest rules says that when we see a rainbow ribbon, we must 'stop and come back', to make sure that no one gets hit by the swing. The children took responsibility and the safety of their friends by reminding each other not to go over the boundary.
One of the children's favourite activities this week has been face painting! The children really enjoyed picking their favourite animal from the little book, finding the right page to show to an educator and sitting super still to have their paint done! This sparked so much creative play later that day, each child taking on the role of their animal, running and hiding with each other in 'the jungle', we also sang a round of old McDonald "and on that farm he had a tiger!"
The water play area was developed this week by turning it into a dinosaur pool! There were pipes and buckets of water leading to a pool for the toy dinosaurs to splash in, and even a little zip line with a small bucket attached for the children to transport water from one place to another! It was so much fun to see how the children used this space; some had the dinosaurs swim in lines, some gave them baths, and some put the dinosaurs in the small zip line bucket to give it a ride! We're excited to see what else the children do with this space next week!
We hope you all have wonderful weekends!
Little Forest Folk
Morden