The start of September has welcomed some new and returning faces into the forest. It has been so lovely to see our sessional children reunited with their friends after the summer break, and also meeting and making new friends as we have welcomed some newcomers into our Little Forest Folk family!
We started the week off by exploring our surroundings as we familiarised ourselves with our learning environment. It was great to see the children who have been with us for longer take care of the new children, ensuring they kept safe and sound through reiterating our forest school rules and giving them a hand to hold when they felt anxious.
The children got really stuck in! They explored the balancing area, used different planks and logs to create obstacle courses, and had lots of fun trying to balance on them. It was lovely to see our Little Forest Folk-ers using their initiative and working as a team to place the planks alongside the dips in the meadow to create a wibbly wobbly bridge.
We spent our Wednesday this week in the meadow due to the Rangers giving our forest a little manicure by removing any dead branches from our beautiful trees. This provided the children with more opportunities the following day as the rangers kindly left some new logs and sticks for the children to play with. This included a brand-new log circle which allowed the children to have their own seat whilst they ate their lunch – specially prepared by our chef again, hooray!
The mud kitchen has also been popular this week, as the children explore ways in which they can move the water, watching it as it slivers and spills into different containers. Our paints this week have also provided us with similar opportunities due to their watery consistency and the children have been fascinated with how the paint manoeuvres around the paper, mixing with other colours on its journey.
We are so delighted that our first week of term has been so wonderful and we are incredibly proud of how our new Little Forest Folk-ers are adapting to their new environment! This is also thanks to our existing children who have shown such caring and thoughtful gestures towards our new friends which has helped the transition be smooth. We cannot wait to watch how they grow and develop this next school year!
We hope you have a wonderful weekend!!
Little Forest Folk
Putney Heath