Our Forest Bakery!
Another lovely week of exploring and creating at Morden! The children have been so wonderful as the educators have been helping the newest children arrive in the forest; they have been welcoming and patient, showing the new children all the fun things we have on offer to play with, and sharing our fun with new friends!
One of the most regular themes the children at Morden like to create play around is cars! We love racing our friends, pretending to drive, using planks of wood to make ramps for the small cars, and this week, we've made our own forest car! Using ropes, logs, crates and tires, the children helped to set up the shape so that they could sit inside together and 'drive to the park!' Our friends used amazing teamwork skills to get it all set up, and we even made a steering wheel out of a paper plate!
We've been on lots of searches for interesting insects and animals hiding around the trees and bushes! The children know that our bug hotels are very popular with slugs and snails at the moment, and we've been peeking in the nooks and crannies to find the baby slugs! We were really enjoying wondering how many slugs were living all together and describing how they looked, "Soo slimy!” and “Soo shiney!". We have also discovered an area near the back of our forest where some beetles have made their home! We were so interested to see them walking over the wood stumps and under fallen branches. The children were interested in talking about the different types of wood that we find on the ground and finding out that the beetles like to eat 'dead wood', which is very flaky, and 'looks like chicken!'
The children have really loved spending some time in the afternoon finding a quiet space to play our musical instruments. We sang songs together and had some time to practice making lovely sounds on our ukulele or the glockenspiel. This week the children have a new instrument to try called a kalimba; an instrument originally from Zimbabwe which sounds a little like a xylophone. The children hold the box shaped instrument in their hands and pluck the steel keys with their thumbs or fingers to make sweet, relaxing sounds! One of the children described, "It sounds like bells!". We love the happy sounds it makes and looking at the names of the notes on the keys 'A', 'E' and listening to what each of them sound like! We also like to play 'slooow' and 'FAST!'
Our forest cooking segment of the week had us making stick bread! The children measured flour and water with the educators, to make the dough nice and sticky, which we then wrapped around some long sticks we found to cook them over the fire! We enjoyed watching the colour of the bread change colour as it cooked, and the smell of cooking bread! As we sat down for our snack and tasted what we baked, the children spoke about what flavours they like, and which would make the bread taste even yummier next time, "I like jam!", "I would like cheese, please!". We love hearing the children's ideas for our future cooking activities!
We hope you all have a wonderful bank holiday weekend and see you next week for lots of forest fun!
Little Forest Folk
Morden