Hop, Skip and Jump!
It’s been so much fun to watch how our new forest grows and changes as our ideas develop! The children really enjoyed exploring around our ‘forest maze’ earlier this week; we had long branches laid out in a pattern to make a winding path in a square shape, with flour sprinkled on the paths to guide us as we walked. The children really enjoyed using their balancing skills and talking about ‘left and right’ turns as they made their way to the middle to stand on the finishing log! This encouraged some children to make their own balance course around the forest, using logs, crates and tires! The children would challenge each other to “hop hop hop!” between the tires and find as many big logs as they could to walk over… “Look how strong I am”!
Near the beginning of the week, we were super excited to spot a baby fox in our forest! We first spotted him exploring along the path near the kitchen, and he didn’t mind us watching him from behind the gate! We went exploring to see if we could find where the fox had gotten in from, and where he could escape from again. We’ve spotted him a couple of times now, and we can’t wait to see if he pops up again!
We’ve been super lucky to have some new chalk board pens with lots of different colours! The children asked if we could draw ‘our houses’ on the chalk boards! Each child would take turns describing what they have in their house, “I have toys, and a table, and dinner!”. The children enjoyed helping us to draw squares “1..2..3..4 sides!” and a triangle on top for the roof “1..2..3 sides!”. It was also really nice to come back later in the day and add more things in our house as we remembered them!
At Morden we always love playing with clay, and we really enjoyed finding different things to squish the clay flat with! We tried logs, water bottles, and our hands! Once we got the clay nice and flat, we used some leaves that we’d collected from the ground to press into the clay and made interesting shapes and patterns! It was lovely to watch the children change their technique for getting the best press for their leaf and experimenting with different leaves and sticks!
Our children always love getting involved with tool use, so we had an amazing time practicing our hammering skills! The children did a wonderful job of listening to the safety rules and looking after themselves and their friends! Our younger children were manually supported by the educators to ensure the weight wasn’t too heavy, and our older children were able to hammer the nails into the log by themselves! We’ve also been doing fire activities this week, singing loads of songs, helping educators to find the right sticks and wood, and helping our friends to write our list of the ‘fire safety rules’ on our black board. It’s been lovely to add more and more to our fire activities!
We hope you all have wonderful weekends!
Little Forest Folk
Morden