Well, what a week we have had! It started off with a beautifully magical forest covered in snow which the children were fascinated by. We had snowballs, snow castles, snow angels and ice-creams created in the snow, with the children finding different ways of scooping it all up and carrying it around. The children also made some observations about the snow, such as how cold it was and that the ice looked like pieces of glass and how if they piled up it all up together, then they could create avalanches and pretend to rescue each other from them! They were also intrigued by all the different footprints that were left in the snow. The tracking sleuths found some small footprints that looked like a bird had left them and then they suddenly disappeared! The children thought about how that might be the bird flying away because their feet were getting cold. Then, we spotted some small paw prints that the children decided must be a squirrel and some bigger ones that could even have been a fox or possibly a rabbit.
Our master builders have also been in the forest this week, we could hear in the distance lots of noise from different tools and so it inspired us to be very creative. The children have been building houses, secret bases, cars and buses from all the crates, planks of wood and tyres and even pretending that each of the sticks were different tools in their building. One child even discovered a bent stick that could be rotated in the ground made a wonderful make-shift drill! This then sent everyone to make volcanoes by digging into the ground and then putting tyres stacked on the hole to make them tall, then when the volcano erupted the tyres would come tumbling down and the children would run away pretending it was hot lava. Some of the children this week even helped use some real tools. They each listened carefully and took turns to hold a branch down and saw little wooden cookies using a bow saw. They were all so proud of their cookies they had made and were fascinated by the ‘cheese’ the saw left behind. The children noticed that the more sawing they did, the more sawdust was left behind. Then some spent their afternoon decorating their wooden cookies into necklaces and watches.
Quacks have echoed through our forest this week and so the children have been on the lookout for ducks and seeing what other birds they could spot. We spotted some pigeons, robins, ducks and even a goose! The children very quickly realised to spot the ducks (and the goose) we had to look at the river. Each day the children looked over fence and bridge to see whether they could spot the birds they could hear. We even began to notice the change in the river each day, whether it was faster or deeper or even noisier! Both the foxes and parakeets have even been having a race with leaves, dropping them into the river and seeing whose floated the fastest down the river. Then we even saw something very big floating down the river, “What’s that?” we heard a child say as we turned round on the bridge to look. “Look, it’s a tree” as a whole tree was floating towards the bridge, it was going much faster than all of our leaves! The children thought about what might have happened for the tree to be floating down the river and they all knew it must have fallen in, but why? The children had some great suggestions including it blew down in the wind, lightening hit it, someone cut it down and one of them even suggested that someone might have shook the tree and made it break causing it to fall in the river.
We have had such a wonderful week and cannot wait to see what next week brings!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham