Grow, grow, grow!
We’ve had a busy week of lots of fantastic play, exploring, and relationship building! Children in the Sessional Hedgehog group started the week with collecting up our favourite play resources, like the binoculars, bottles, our small cash register, and opening up our ‘forest shop’! The children invited us to come and have a look to see what we’d like and decide on a good price for each item; “5 stones, please!”. We made some ‘shopping baskets’ out of cardboard boxes so that we could walk around the benches where the toys were laid out and collect what we wanted to buy. We made some shop signs with the chalk boards and drew pictures of the things we were selling. The children loved to share the role of shop keeper!
All of our Little Forest Folk-ers have continued to love art and painting this week. We use our time before morning snack to get the paper and paints out, and paint what we’re thinking about that day; this then acts as a prompt for our play! One of the children in Badger group decided to paint a car, “An electric car!”, so while our picture was drying, we constructed an “electric car” out of the logs and planks, leading to some really imaginative role play! We also took inspiration from a tall tower someone had painted; we found the magnetic blocks and measured how high we could build our tower! It was lovely to see the children using their maths skills while reading the numbers and using their teamwork skills to keep the tower steady!
All of the children took part in our very first Fire Circle at Morden on Monday! The children were introduced to our fire safety rules, like ‘walk around the edge’, and ‘waiting until the teacher invites you to come in’. The children helped to collect the fast burning sticks and bring them over to give to the fire one by one. They took the ‘respect position’ down on one knee so we didn’t wabble and showed amazing listening! It was great to see the children taking ownership of their safety and keeping their friends safe too.
Later in the week, the Hedgehogs worked super hard to look after the patch of land next to our car park area. We put on our gardening gloves and went out with a rubbish bag to collect any bits of plastic we could find that would ‘hurt the flowers’. We loved making rainbows in the water while spraying the hose and shaking the boxes of wildflower seeds and to spread them all out! We can’t wait to see them start to grow!
We also started our plant growing activities with peeling an avocado seed, which we’ll suspend in a glass of water to watch sprout. We realised that we didn’t have any toothpicks to poke in the seed, so the children joined in with whittling sticks to poke into the seed so it can start to grow! It was a great activity to introduce tool work to the children, using the tool gloves and a vegetable peeler to remove the park and make the end pointed. We can’t wait to introduce the children to more tool use soon!
We hope you all have wonderful long bank holiday weekends!
Little Forest Folk
Morden