This week we have had a wonderful bunch of budding chefs in the forest. With the fresh mud back within the forest from all the rain we have had it was the perfect time to add a new item to our mud kitchen. The humble ice-cream scoops which have proved to be the most popular item ever. The children were fascinated by their scooping abilities and the button they could press to get the mud back out. So naturally the children have been busy creating an ice-cream factory and an ice-cream parlour. The factory was even complete with ice cream making robots that the children made from recycled boxes and tubes with drawn on buttons. They even had a sleep button for if the robot got tired! Some children even made workbooks for all the important work the people in the factory do. They included instructions on how to make a metal spoon to eat the ice cream with.
It’s wonderful to see how knowledgeable the children are with the world around them, understanding that metal must be dug out of the ground and then melted down to make it into a shape where it is cooled (even if the instructions say they are cooled by a fan). The children then served ice-cream to any paying customer, of course the currency here at Little Forest Folk is treasure, which the children find when digging around the forest. You’d say the number of scoops of ice cream you would like and the flavour and then they would count that many scoops of mud out and as they gave you your bowl of ice cream, you’d be informed that they only had chocolate flavour!
With all the pretend ice-cream making, the children tried their hand at some real cooking this week. Some children made some delicious vegan and gluten free biscuits where they recognised numbers on the scales to measure out weights of ingredients. They all mixed the ingredients together and we decided to make two giant biscuits that covered the whole baking trays which we could be cut up after to take home. Other children decided they would like to make cupcakes to celebrate some friend’s birthdays. Tasty cupcakes were made with care as they explored the texture change as each ingredient was added to the cake batter. The children then all had turns spooning the mixture into different cupcake cases to cook.
Our creative Little Forest Folk-ers have also been exploring shapes this week and what we can do with them. We’ve had stars, crescents, hearts, diamonds, triangles, and squares all drawn, coloured, or painted and then cut out of cardboard to hang around the forest. Then, one of the children had a beautiful idea of creating a mobile with all their shapes for their younger siblings at home. Everyone then wanted to make mobiles with their shapes too so off everyone went to find the perfect sized sticks for their mobiles and to cut some string off our pretend spider web to make them. The children helped make holes in the shapes and threaded the string through before getting some help with tying knots. The mobiles then hung beautifully off the trees in the forest until it was time to go home. The children also made some absolutely stunning ground art this week. They used sticks and planks of wood to make a frame and filled it with sticks, stones, and leaves to create a wonderful miniature forest picture all together.
The eco-school council this week noticed how with all the rain we’ve had, lots of litter had been washed into the surrounding area of the forest. So, it was decided that we needed to go on yet another litter pick. The children collected all the pieces of rubbish they could find and then they sorted it out into categories. We had rubbish that could be recycled in one box, rubbish that couldn’t in another, things we could reuse in our junk modelling in another box and even a box of natural materials that the children had previously painted. All the boxes were then emptied into the correct place as dictated by the children as they are now very aware of how we can look after our environment and the different types of litter we can find.
We hope you all have a wonderful weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham