It has been a Marvellous week of mathematicians calculating their way around the forest, counting pinecones, gathering sets of twigs, and washing and balancing stones into wobbly towers. Our creative team of educators have devised all sorts of games to encourage the development of our children’s knowledge of numbers, volume, weights, and shapes.

We had a wonderful game which involved numbers and their matching amount of dots on discs of wood. Our young maths students counted dots, they added sticks to the equation, (pun intended) and the older children enjoyed recognising the written form of a number, whilst the younger children have been learning their numbers and revelling in the texture of the wooden discs.

We had another game of “find and name the shapes”. Hidden about the forest were cardboard cut-outs of various shapes and this exciting activity challenged the children to hunt high and low for all the different hidden cut-outs. We gathered them all together as they were located and counted how many we’d found in total before rushing off to hide them all again. Many of the children know triangles and circles but we had pentagons, hexagons and rectangles hidden as well, which we all loved learning the names of.

We also had splattering paint pens, to create bright and colourful works of art and a peg game which saw pegs clipped onto picture cards to match the number of fish and bubbles to the number of pegs. We had pattern games too, and the mud kitchen was all about measuring out volumes of liquid to create potions.

We also had a “build a car and truck” game which our little adventurers all loved as they screwed the wheels on and attached the concrete mixer to the truck base and so on. This game included looking at the picture instructions and trying to interpret the next instruction.

A warm welcome to our two new Little Forest Folk-ers who are amazed, curious, and engrossed in the rhythm of the forest already!

See you all next time.

Little Forest Folk
Twickenham