Morden’s Forest Potions!
Morden has been full of creative play, and care for our plant life this week! The children have been taking lots of opportunities to work on our growing boxes at the front of the site. We’ve been enjoying looking at what all the different seeds look like and finding words to compare them, “These seeds are smaller than these ones!” and “Sunflower seeds are stripey like a zebra!”.
Forest Teacher Harriet brought in some interesting plants to talk about too, like a spider plant with “looong legs!” and some coriander for the children to taste! Our indoor space and outdoor space is looking lush and green, with the new plants inside, and all this lovely rain to help our fruit trees grow their blossom and big green leaves! The children have started to measure how tall the young trees are, and we’ll continue to measure them every few weeks to see how tall they’ve gotten!
Our children have been interested in exploring more of the little paths and natural hideaways we have on site. We’ve been bringing our magnifying glasses and binoculars with us to see which animals we can find on the way, whether they’re the littlest insects under the leaves, or big geese flying overhead. It’s been super interesting to find out which insects like to live in certain areas of the forest! We’ve found a hidden tree covered in spider webs, giving the children opportunities to use their counting skills to see how many spiders there are, this also encourages them to look very closely at the details of their environment! Our new hidey spaces have sparked some brilliant games of hide and seek with all the children and educators joining in! The children take turns hiding, and take turns leading the group to find them! It’s been lovely to experience the forest so full of laughter!
Some of the children have been helping the educators to make little posters of our daily routines. We sit down together and talk about our favourite activities through the day, when we have snack, and other important things we do, like going for a sleep or washing our hands. This has been a great activity for the children and is very helpful to look at if we start to miss mum or dad through the day.
We’ve had some brilliant fun experimenting with our home-made playdough this week! Everyone has spent some time squishing and rolling. The children show us what strong hands they have while making a ‘big meat ball’, or ‘worm spaghetti!’. They have loved to make their own little people by rolling a ‘big tummy and little head’, ‘like a snow man!’. Some children use their playdough dolls to play a little game of families too! Some children have loved to mix stones and sticks in with the playdough, making them disappear, then squishing it up to find them again!
Our favourite imaginative game this week has been visiting our forest shop in the mornings and seeing what has been put in the coloured ‘potion bottles’ each morning. Sometimes there’s stones and leaves, sometimes water, sometimes petals! These potions will turn us into different animals, depending on which colour we use! The red one turns us into ‘T-rexs’, the blue one turns us into ‘fish’, and the purple one turns us into bears! Each morning the children have been so excited to start this imaginative game, talking about which new potion their going to make to turn them into a new animal, and chase each other around! It’s brilliant to watch their friendships grow so beautifully while their having so much fun!
We hope you all have wonderful weekends!
Little Forest Folk
Morden