Once again, the children of Twickenham have had a busy week in the forest with lots of fun-filled activities. A big interest this week has been cooking and so the children have all been busy making both mud and real cakes! Grating chalk makes a wonderful icing for the tops of the mud cakes which the children have been concocting from things they find in the forest. Eggs were a fascination for the children, they searched high and low around the forest for different types of eggs they could use to make their pretend omelettes. They searched for chicken, duck, dinosaur and turtle eggs and soon the educators were served up some delicious omelettes and scrambled eggs.
We’ve also had a wonderful try at some real-life baking, making special orange cakes on the fire. All the children set about scooping out the inside of their orange and filling it up with the cake batter we mixed up, counting out cups of flour and butter and introducing the idea of half or a quarter measure. We then placed our cakes wrapped up in tin foil on the fire and waited very patiently until they had heated up. We saw some batter ooze out of the foil, it was quite funny to watch it escape. When they were all cooked, we got to sit around the fire after dinner to enjoy a lovely home-made dessert. We talked about how we can have healthy and unhealthy foods and what foods we think are healthy, such as fruit and vegetables.
With the wind being a little stronger on Tuesday, the perfect opportunity arose for the children across the site to explore its effects. We set off making paper kites, decorating pieces of paper with beautiful pictures before attaching them to string and a stick. The children explored how if they stood still, the wind had to be really blowing for their kite to lift up, but if they ran, the kite would fly high in the air straight away! We’ve also had Japanese Children’s Day this week which meant we saw the different types of kites that they have in Japan. The children especially liked the fish shaped kites that the families fly on that special day and we learned how to say hello in Japanese, Kon'nichiwa! We even used this in our morning hello song this week to introduce ourselves to our friends and the forest.
Thursday presented yet another wonderful opportunity for the children as they noticed through the gates that Heatham House had a lot more visitors than usual. The Educators explained to them how it was a polling station for the day and that lots of people were coming to the main building to vote for the person they would like to be Mayor. The children then decided that we needed to vote for something ourselves. Upon some thought, it was decided that the children of the forest needed to vote on which shape was Little Forest Folk Twickenham’s favourite shape. Some ballot papers were made and the children each visited the pretend polling station we set up and marked near the shape that was their favourite. Once all the votes were in, we all counted up the votes together using a tally chart. The children then counted up each of the tallies and it was decided that a triangle is the favourite shape of the forest!
The eco-school council this week has been organising another litter pick. The children all went around the grounds of Heatham House and its car park to search for all the litter that had been left and blown around by the wind. The children did so well and managed to collect two whole bags of rubbish! Well done!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham