Paper dolls and minibeast hotels!
A landmark event happened this week at Morden. On Tuesday it was our first day of continual rain since opening. With a dozen or so new settlers, some may have feared such an event, but our already hardy and outdoorsy Forest Folk rose to the challenge. The educators were busy during the morning set up, putting up tarps for extra cover, just in case, but unsurprisingly the children decided to ignore the covered play areas and instead found themselves splashing and sploshing in the muddy puddles. The tarps did come in handy however as a method for collecting the rainwater for more messy and muddy play, so it wasn’t all set up in vain. It was a true demonstration though of how well our children have settled and the true joys of our ever-changing outdoor classroom.
We have also been getting creative this week and inspired by one of our favourite books ‘Paper Dolls’ by Julia Donaldson, we decided to make some paper dolls. Luckily, we managed to find some lovely stickers with a variety of body and facial features which proved very entertaining to the children as they each decorated their own doll. We had some children deciding to make a doll that represented a family member or friend, however others were very imaginative and instead decided to create their own monsters. It was lovely to see the variety of outcomes and the paper dolls have now taken up residency under our gazebo roof, in a dry warm space where the children can enjoy observing them.
Quite often as educators we find ourselves bringing in strange and wonderful objects from home that we think the children would like to either play with or turn into something of their own. This week was a great example when Harriet brought in a small set of shelves housed in a box with Perspex windows. Harriet no longer had a use for the object however Otis and Spike soon began to think of how the children might be able to use it and decided that it could become a minibeast hotel! The idea being that we would fill each shelf with natural resources and recycled material to make a nice cosy home for our minibeasts. We therefore challenged the children to use our set of loppers to cut some bamboo to place in one compartment of the “hotel”. For those who were interested, they took it in turns to cut small 10-15cm long hollow lengths of bamboo with support from Spike. These make the perfect miniature apartments for any trendy minibeast looking for a home in the Canon Hill Lane area. The children also used toilet rolls and hay to fill the hotel. When fully complete we will find a place to install the hotel and hopefully over time the children can watch and observe as the hotel has visitors come and go!
We hope you all have wonderful weekends, and we cannot wait to see what adventures we get up to next week!
Little Forest Folk
Morden