This week has seen the addition of Annie to our team. Annie is an energetic and enthusiastic primary school teacher who is currently taking time out from her teaching to pursue a Masters in Early Childhood Education. We are delighted that she can fit in some part time work in the forest with us in combination with her studies as she has a passion for nature education in the early years which is lovely to see. Welcome Annie.
This week we have had great fun with spiders! We've used spiders as inspiration to observe and talk about features of living creatures. We've also been using tools to create our own spider crafts and have been practicing tripod grips and fine motor control.
The nature hunts whilst looking for spiders have been great fun with the children providing many accurate and the occasional amusing observations about what they know about spiders. One eagle eyed little explorer managed to find a young wolf spider. Wolf spiders live in tunnels instead of building webs and come out to snatch their food. Some clever spotting to find one of these beauties.
We've had lots of fascinating chats about nature and of course the children have loved exploring rope play as ever in addition to showing our new starters best techniques for climbing trees.
To make spider crafts we've been using hole punches with all children and have then been practicing threading for the legs. Some gorgeous little creations have been made. For those children who have been attending for a little longer and are a bit more experienced with tool use, we've been whittling - think intense concentration and such pride in their achievements.
For our cookery lesson this week the children made roasted marrow and butternut squash, followed by a simple tomato pasta bake and for pudding we made fruit kebabs, which the children loved personalising with their favourite fruit combinations. Another round of empty plates following the lesson and an impressive amount of attention paid to the detail of cooking. We may encourage the next Jamie Oliver with these lessons - who knows!
Enjoy your weekend and we look forward to lots more fun next week!
Little Forest Folk
Learn more about the benefits of outdoor play