The Volclayno!
The children spent loads of time one afternoon creating clay creatures! There were lots of animals made, like penguins and ducks, and the children would use chips of wood from the ground to act as the beak. Some children used sticks to decorate, sticking them into the side of the clay to make ‘arms’; one child decided to put two balls of clay at each end of a stick to make a “heavy lifter!” and would lift it over his head to show how strong he was! Later in the week, the educators led an activity where we made a ‘clay volcano’, using a plastic bottle in the centre, and decorated with sticks by the children helping! It was great to see everyone working together!
One morning this week, the children were super excited to have found a Leopard slug, sitting on a big wooden stump! We spent lots of time sat down watching what the slug was doing, talking about where he might be going “going to the shop to buy his breakfast”. We then noticed that there were 2 leopard slugs on the same wooden stump! The children assumed that “they must be friends!” and one child suggested that we should name them “b” and “l”, because one was “big” and one was “little”!
Another activity that the children really enjoyed this week have been making Squeezy flour balloons! It’s a great sensory activity if we find it a little hard to control all our energy, or if we’re finding it a little hard to keep our hands ‘kind and gentle’, we can “squeeze squeeze squeeze” to help our hands feel better. Making them was a super fun activity, using our fine motor skills to put the end of the funnel inside the neck of the balloon, and pouring the flour in. We also discovered that if we blow air into the balloon first, you can make a flour cannon!!
We’ve also been super interested in fish recently, encouraged by some books that we read regularly. One of the educators helped us to tie bendy sticks into a fish shape! These were a great play resource, which we then decided to hang up near our forest shop, and paint with bright colours! It was beautiful decoration to have to come back to and look at later!
Little Forest Folk
Morden