Our Week in the Forest...
The Winter sun hung low but shone bright this week, creeping through the trees and finding open areas to light up with warm rays. While under these rays, children would peel off little gloves and wiggle fingers as they warmed up. As soon as gloves and hats had been thrown off with great abandon, it was time to run around and put them all on again as a surprise shower of rain descended with all the splashing-in-puddles fun this brings. People who imagine children outdoors playing in the winter months may only imagine children struggling to get through cold, frosty days but our children are having first hand experience of the diversity in weather conditions as light and dark, rain and sun battle things out all around them.
There has been a big building theme emerge in our Little Forest Folk-er's play this week. A small group of children helped Xiao make a very small fairy house on the forest floor. Children were collecting sticks, snapping them to size and helping lay them in a tepee shape. When children wanted to lay sticks on top of the tepee, Xiao would encourage experimentation so children could test their ideas and see what happened. The house was decorated with stones and pieces of ivy as well as some unusual pieces of bark.
Hannah had observed this interest and later in the week helped the children make a similar structure but on a much bigger scale and they got very hands-on with building a house for themselves. Using rope and lots of large sticks and branches, the children made their very own "forest castle'. They were measuring sticks against themselves or their legs and using this to organise the building project with longer sticks being used as the frame and support for the frame, while smaller sticks kept getting layered around the structure to reinforce the 'walls'. This was also a great chance for children to weave rope in and out of the sticks and practice their knot tying. What may have started out as a simple building project suddenly became a play experience where children where engaged in mathematics with shape and measure being used to categorise resources. The social development was amazing as they all worked as a team to make this magical home.
This mathematical learning continued with Miranda this week, as in true Little Forest Folk fashion, the learning took an unexpected turn. With the help of pegs, children enjoyed organising numbers but one child who speaks Japanese started teaching us how to count in Japanese. Miranda, who spent many years leading tours around China then helped the children recite the numbers in Mandarin and our Chinese speaking children loved helping her out. Dejan, not wanting to miss out on the spontaneous language class then taught some of the numbers in Romanian. Again, what could have just been a number activity became so much more as children got to contribute parts of their cultural identity and have this taken seriously, to feel like it was valued by Miranda and Dejan and shared with their friends.
We hope you enjoy your weekends and may you get time to stop and spot the first signs that Spring is starting to stir around us (our site is littered with little flowers and we have also spotted the first Daffodil of the season!)
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham