The weather this week started beautifully with mild days and sunshine that persuaded our crocuses and snow drops to begin to bud and some, even open! The children noticed all of the flowers as soon as they came in, as patches of purple, white and yellow have begun to appear through the mud and grass across the camps. The children have been fascinated by this new development and each day we have had to check to see if we think any more have begun to bloom as well as look for and count any new buds on the trees. The children can now tell all of the educators how the plants grow and form buds and some have even acted out how they slowly open into beautiful flowers.
This week the children have been taking part in National Story Telling Week. We have had clock stories told to us each day as well as many fairy tales requested by the children. The most requested story however has been the Titanic, and each day the children have sat upon their pretend Titanic ship they have built with their planks of wood and tyres to listen to the story. Then, when the story has finished, their ship sinks, and they all pretend to fall into the water and swim. We’ve also been sharing lots of stories with our friends and educators as we wrote down our helicopter stories. These are where our educators write down word for word the story, we share with them and then when it is read back out, we act it out on our make-shift stages. The children became, fairies, Thunderbirds, robots and cats amongst many other characters they had created. We then found another use for our stages where the children could create music and sing songs as they performed for all their friends some wonderful concerts. We had stick microphones, milk bottle and bucket drums and even some wonderful back up dancers!
Another story we have been really listening to this week is the story of Chinese New Year. The children have all been listening and learning about the race between all the animals for Chinese New Year as well as how different people celebrate it. We tried our hand at making some red envelopes to fill with gifts for our Mummies and Daddies and we all got involved creating a beautiful red, gold, green, silver and blue dragon head. The children have all been painting it as well as practicing their cutting skills, using the scissors to cut up tissue paper to stick to our painted head. Then, when our dragon head had dried, we all learned about dragon dances and thought about how we could have a go at one. So, off we went to find some big pieces of material for us all to hide under, we put on some Chinese dragon dance drum music, we took turns wearing the dragon head and off we went dancing around the forest to the music. We reached up, ducked down, zig-zagged and jumped to the music remembering to follow our friend in front of us and became a wonderful dragon.
We’ve also been very busy exploring physics this week and asking lots of questions as we explore how things work. The children have been exploring a seesaw that we created with a log and a plank of wood, practicing balancing and beginning to notice that our friends need to be the same size to make it go up and down, so an educator couldn’t possibly stand or sit on one end. Then as some of the younger and older children took turns, we problem solved and realised we can have the smaller person at the end of a plank, but the bigger person can be closer to the middle and our seesaw still works. The children also explored firing our missiles to save the world with our extra springy catapult. We used scrunched up material balls and toilet tubes as our projectiles as we discovered how we could make them fly really far with our catapult by pulling them further back. Some of the children even noticed that the direction we pulled the elastic in affected the way our missile would fly.
We have had such a wonderful week, we hope you did too and have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham