The warm and gorgeous sunshine has poked through the forest this week and the children have mirrored it with their beautiful smiley faces, beaming through the trees.
We have been busy getting creative with all different materials to create some masterpieces. We have been junk modelling using cardboard boxes, tubes and cartons to make robot heads, painting them all grey to look like metal and trying to attach them together with tape. We’ve used boxes to make doll houses, painting and decorating them for our dolls so that they have somewhere to live. We’ve been cutting bits of fabric to make clothes and tying them to sticks to make our dolls, as well as using plaited coloured wool to make other dolls where the children practice their tying skills.
We even found a tiny swing for the dolls on one of our tree branches so they could go to their own forest school. We’ve been using lots of paint as we created traffic lights, and start and finish lines for racing along with a painted giant chequered flag. We have been racing around the trees of the camp as well as across the meadow. The children followed instructions on the type of race too as we explored all the different ways we could move by having running, jumping, hopping, crawling, rolling and backwards walking races! We’ve also talked about what the different colours of the traffic lights mean, and the children made up a traffic light game where we had to call out a colour for the traffic light and the children would complete the action to go with it. We had freeze, run, and walk.
Our Little Forest Folk-ers have showed a great interest in transport this week with all our car races but also, they have been busy getting creative with the crates and planks of woods, turning them into planes, cars and boats. Long lines of crates turned into train carriages where the children pretended to board the train whilst it stopped at the station. Every so often we could even hear a real train horn as it went past, so naturally the children would respond with their own train’s horn. They all enjoyed sitting on their train, plane and sometimes boat as they pretended to go off on holiday around the UK and world. They each collected their backpack as they needed luggage for their trip and climbed aboard with their ticket in hand, wondering where it may take them.
The crates have also been turned into prams this week. Our stick babies and dolls have all been relaxing in the prams as the children slid the crates through the mud. They took turns pretending to be the babies too and when they climbed in their pretend pram, their friends tried so hard to push the prams along but realised they were much heavier. So, the educators got to join in pretending to be taking their babies out for a walk as we pushed the crates along. Then, oh no, some pesky seagulls came and joined our game. Some of the children came swooping in, pretending they were seagulls and wanting to steal the babies’ food. We had to protect them! We tried to scare away all the seagulls with lots of loud and glorious singing!
We hope you have had a wonderful week too and we cannot wait to see what next week brings. Have lovely weekends all!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham