This week the children have been promoting global citizenship with the eco council as we have been busy celebrating International Women’s Day, International Science Week and Mother’s Day – we really are celebrating all of the fantastic women in our lives and the world. We looked at all the different occupations we could do when we grow up and how we can be anything that we want to be. As it was science week, all the children have been fascinated by various different scientific achievements and we decided to look each day at a different female scientist. So far, we have looked at Mary Anning, who was a palaeontologist and fossil collector; Katherine Johnson, who was a mathematician who works for NASA and helped send rockets to space; Amelia Earhart an aviator; and Marie Curie, who invented the X-Ray. All these different women inspired our children this week in their creations.
We have been busy mixing all of the ingredients together and making salt dough which we pressed stones into to create our own fossils. We have explored different ways to make paper airplanes which we were able to fly across the forest and measure with our giant ruler how far they flew. We attempted to launch rockets that were bottles beautifully decorated by the children which we filled with soda and mentos to shoot up (sadly it didn’t quite go to plan and our educators just got covered in the soda). We then found different ways to launch our rockets, including, a makeshift seesaw where our rocket was placed on one end and an educator would jump on the other and using our elasticated rope as a catapult across the meadow. We also explored X-rays and skeletons by making a pretend X-ray of the educators and our friends by drawing around them on the paper and on the window then adding in different bones. This then led to us all being doctors for the day with our doctors’ kits making sure everyone was ok and the children creating their own miniature X-ray drawings to lay over the patients.
We had some new pallets delivered this week and we have been busy making use of them in the forest. We of course decided that one was for Santa’s new house. So, we did some weaving on it, decorating it beautifully in red, gold and green. Another we turned into a wonderful slide! The children were so excited about our slide that they all had turns climbing up and sliding down. They even said with our swing that it was just like the playground that they really miss, so it was beautiful to see the joy on their faces of being able to go on a slide once again.
Our eco-council have been very busy this week informing all of their friends about the different things you might find on the floor outside. They explained that sticks and leaves are ok to be on the floor as they are from the trees, but crisp packets and bottles can’t because they aren’t made by the trees. They then took their friends on a litter pick with educators in the car park finding lots of rubbish that had blown in over the last few weeks. The eco-council explained how to use the litter pickers and that we needed special gloves if we were going to pick any up.
We hope you all have had a wonderful week too and we hope you have lovely weekends!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham