Songs in the Sunshine!
We’ve had loads of beautiful moments in the forest this week, lucky us! On Monday, we had Joe join us from Liberty Woodland School. He bought his guitar, and lots of fun songs with him. The children were so excited to hear their favourite songs from The Lion King, Paw Patrol, and Moana! There was dancing and singing in the reading area, and the children showed amazing listening, and were very careful when Joe helped them to have a turn playing the guitar.
All this amazing hot weather has given us the perfect opportunity for some creative water play! The children have been experimenting with putting the guttering pipes at different heights and they watched to see how fast the water ran as we placed one end of the pipe higher and higher. This activity developed into using multiple pipes, and big buckets so that the children could pour lots of water on any part of the pipes, and to also see which colour bucket the water would pour into! On Wednesday, the children were given blocks of ice with toy cars and plastic bugs inside and tried different methods of melting the ice to retrieve the things inside! Some tried pouring water, some tried rubbing the ice with their hands, and some waited patiently until the sun melted it for them!
The children have loved creating our ‘forest posters’ recently, and this week we have been making ‘forest maps’ to continue this activity! The children would describe what they would usually see as they walked through the forest while walking along the paths, “first the shed, then the reading stables, then the hedgehog house…”. We put marks on the page where we thought each area of the forest belonged to, linked them up by drawing a path, and coloured it in with lots of green pencils to pay tribute to our beautiful trees! When the children were finished, it was used in a “treasure hunt” led by the children, where they were looking for the “x marks the spot” around the forest! The educators placed some sticks into an ‘x’ shape along the paths, and we counted how many we found! When the children decided to play the game again later in the day, they independently made the x’s themselves for their friends to find!
One of the most popular activities this week has been Alphabet Fishing! Harriet made us some amazing fishing rods, using twigs, string, and big horseshoe magnets on the end. Our ‘pond’ was made of branches placed into a rectangle shape, and magnetic letters in the middle! The children would sit on the edge and see what letters or sounds they’d collect with their magnet! They would get very excited when they found a letter that was in their name!
Snack time has gone up a level this week, as we’ve opened our new Snack Café! Once the children have washed their hands, they line up at the shop to collect their bowl from their educator and pick which pieces of fruit they’d like to eat. We take our bowl over to our table, and once all the fruit is eaten and our bowl is empty, we can go back to the café and ask for our biscuit. It’s been so nice to see the children independently choose which fruit they’d like and taking the time to decide when they’re ready to come and visit the Snack Café. We’ll definitely be continuing this in future!
We hope you all have had lovely weeks too and we hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Morden