Welcome to the Forest!
We’ve been so happy to see all our children and educators arriving excited to our new space to play here at Little Forest Folk Morden! Our mornings have been bright and sunny; having these beautiful blue skies, brilliant bluebells and tulips, brings a feeling of magic to our play! We’re all so happy to be able to share our play ideas with our new friends and seeing where the days will flow! It’s been a pleasure to see the children settling and becoming more comfortable in our new space, getting to know our new friends, and letting our imaginations run wild!
The full day ‘Badger’ group started the week with lots of painting and art activities. They explored shapes and colours on the Perspex canvas hung in the tree and loved making funny faces through the glass at their friends painting on the other side! The paint adds even more colour to our forest and is a lovely opportunity for our little adventurers to come back to their painting later in the day if they want to add to it.
The sessional ‘Hedgehogs’ have also loved exploring painting and art this week! The children independently poured their own paints into the trays, cleaned their own brushes, and experimented with mixing paint colours to see how they change to a brand-new colour! We’ve been using big cardboard pieces tied to the fence to make our canvas and blending lots of colours in a spectrum to make ‘the forever changing sky!’. So beautiful!
A newly opened nursery means lots of cardboard boxes to reuse! The Hedgehogs built their own Cardboard Castle with our very own Hedgehog Flag! The children would go on exhibitions to find the best branches and logs to make our castle sturdy and practiced cutting the cardboard and tape with scissors. This was a great opportunity to talk about safety rules and boundaries while using tools, before we start using bigger tools with our Little Forest Folk-ers! We also crafted our own bags using boxes and string, which prompted some lovely explorative play with the children, as they looked around on the ground for interesting stones, leaves, and treasures they’d like to keep!
All of our children have been very involved with caring for the plants and wildlife we have in our space. Our natural space is very precious to us, and we talk about being ‘kind and gentle’ to the plants and animals, as well as respecting our ‘rainbow ribbons’ which act as our boundaries. When we see a rainbow ribbon, we ‘stop, and come back’. These are in place to let the plants have their space to grow without being stepped on. The children loved taking responsibility for watering the plants we’re growing, and they have been noticing when a new leaf is growing on our baby trees. They even started counting the colourful flowers! It’s been so lovely to watch the relationship between the children and the outdoor space begin, we’re looking forward to planting our own seeds very soon! We’re so lucky to be able to watch the birds make their nests above us, and we’ve really enjoyed listening to the birds sing their songs throughout the day; we like to sing our songs back to them too!
What a wonderful first week we have had, and we cannot wait to see what next week brings. We hope in the meantime though that you have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Morden