Searching for Snails
Our Little Forest Folk-ers really like getting involved with lots of great crafting activities, and this week we started making our own Christmassy envelopes! The children took great care to cover the envelopes in their favourite colour of paint and painted their favourite things about Christmas on the front! “I painted a tree!” “I painted a present!” It’s been really fun introducing some Christmas activities, we can’t wait to incorporate some more into the exciting weeks to come!
It’s always nice to introduce a new challenge to the children, and earlier this week we brought out a new puzzle for the children to explore, with parts of the body to put together. This puzzle has lots of different layers, looking at the skin, muscle, and organs/veins as you remove each layer. Spending time working out the body puzzle has prompted some interesting conversations with the children, about what our muscles and bones are for, where our heart and lungs are, and how to find your own pulse to feel your blood flowing! The children have been finding it so interesting, and we can’t wait to keep these conversations going!
As the evenings have been getting darker, we have been taking the opportunity to experiment with light and colours! The children really enjoy going on evening adventures with the torches to have a look for treasures in the dark bushes, and love to spot the shapes which are cast in the shadows. One evening we built a den inside, using the torches and coloured blocks which we could shine the lights through. We had a brilliant time experimenting with changing the colour of the light using the blocks, and how we could make different looking shadows while moving them!
The explorers are showing so much care and interest in the life in our forest, we really love going on bug hunts to see what creatures we are sharing our environment with. We found a huge family of snails sheltered under a big rock, and the children had lots of questions to ask of their neighbours! “Why is this one a different colour?” “This one blows bubbles!” We really enjoy having these moments in the forest where the educators and children learn together, we looked up lots of snail facts that we didn’t know before! We found out that when a snail is blowing bubbles it means it is scared, so we made sure to pop that one back where he was before, so he wasn’t upset anymore, “sorry snail!”
Little Forest Folk
Morden