It’s been yet another busy week in the forest this week. We have been busy celebrating St Patrick’s Day and getting ready for our fashion shows raising money for Red Nose Day. All the children have been getting wonderfully creative as they decorated bags with fabric paints, created tool belts and headbands with cardboard and fabric pieces, dresses out of old shirts and these shirts also made excellent superhero capes. It’s been so lovely to see everyone getting involved imagining and creating their own items. Of course, we also needed hair and make-up, so armed with stick hairbrushes, stick curling irons and sticks with leaves as make up sets, the educators all had turns in the children’s salons to make sure we were all ready for the fashion shows too!
The children all helped create our catwalk using crates and planks of wood trying to make it as long as possible. Once finished, on went the children’s choice of song as they marched down the catwalk, striking a pose at the end and twirling. All our friends were cheering us on as we showed off our creations.
For St Patrick’s Day, we listened to lots of stories about leprechauns and fairies as we made soda bread. The children all had turns measuring the ingredients and mixing them all together to create their dough. They then made little holes in it before it was put in the oven. Then at afternoon snack we were all very lucky to try some with a little butter and jam. Everyone decided that it was delicious and that we must make it again.
The children have shown a particular interest this week in bumblebees. We’ve had many discussions about the bees collecting pollen and nectar and going to their hives to make honey. Everyone was fascinated in learning this, so we made some of our very own beehives. We painted some cut out hexagons yellow and stuck them on some card as our beehive. The children also really wanted to help the bees to find safe homes and flowers that they like, so we have made a special flower meadow for the bees. The children collected leaves and compost soil using shovels and a wheelbarrow and had turns at using a rake to prepare the ground. They then carefully sprinkled lots of the teeny tiny seeds and a little more soil on top and are now checking every day to see if there are any signs of the seeds growing.
Obstacle courses have been very popular across both camps this week. We’ve seen some very long courses stretching across the whole camp as well as some circular courses that start and end in the same place. The camps have certainly been filled with enthusiastic builders that were eager to create the obstacle courses each day, making sure each day they got even bigger. The children have been problem solving as they find ways to negotiate their obstacles and how they can work together to help each other out when the course becomes a little tricky. Some of the children have been enjoying adding bricks to the obstacle courses as steppingstones, but those who found these a little challenging found another way round, they added some planks of wood parallel to the bricks so that you could choose which route you’d like to take. This then led to everyone making really hard routes next to easy routes.
The eco-school council have been particularly green fingered this week with all of their planting. They’ve helped clear out our vegetable patch and begun to plant some new seeds. All the children knew that they needed looking after with plenty of water and sunlight in order to grow. We then had to make sure the seeds were protected from any hungry birds, so we created a scarecrow to stand guard. We also used our vegetable planting as an opportunity to talk about healthy and unhealthy foods and how different people eat different styles of food around the world. We also had some fruit tree saplings arrive this week and so the eco-school council have had their work cut out for them as they had to dig the biggest holes they have ever dug for our new trees! Once the holes were big enough our educators would hold the tree carefully in the hole while the children filled them back up to plant our trees. We are all very excited by our new Pear, Plum, Cherry and Apple trees.
We have had such a fun filled week, we hope you did too and have lovely weekends all!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham