This week we have been busy celebrating Valentine’s Day and Shrove Tuesday which all the children knew as Pancake Day. We have been creating beautiful crafts for our loved ones and friends for Valentine’s day as we explored cutting potatoes into different shapes to print with using paint to make beautiful cards. We also practised our fine motor skills as we threaded pipe cleaners through holes around a heart which we made with a hole punch. The children were fascinated by the contraption, figuring out how to squeeze it to punch holes.
Then came Shrove Tuesday and Pancake day, where we listened to yet another new story, the traditional story of the wives hearing the church bells and running with their pancakes. The children loved this new story and asked to act it out. So, we put on some pretend aprons that we made out of materials and ran with our pancakes in frying pans across the meadow. Then it was our turn to make some pancakes. We mixed together all of the ingredients that we needed, counting out spoons and cups before cooking them over our fire. Xiao was tremendous at flipping the pancakes, and the children all predicted how many times he would successfully flip them. We then talked about who was the closest to guessing, sadly it was not the child who together guessed 100, as they picked the biggest number they knew. Once our pancakes were cooked, we then topped them with our chopped-up strawberries, raspberries and bananas that we all had turns chopping as well as attempted squeezing the juice out of a lemon. The children all ate a pancake, trying their creations and there was a collective decision that they were in fact delicious!
As it began to rain as the week went on, the mud returned to the forest and this in turn brought back the scary mud monsters! The children painted each other with the mud and stomped around the forest chasing each other. Then we heard “Can we make a monster mask?” to which everyone thought was a wonderful idea. We made shape monsters with cardboard, sticks and various shaped fabric pieces which the children stuck to their mask. The children then held them up as they ran and stomped around the forest. Some were even hidden around for friends to find and pretend to be scared of!
Our titanic ship this week has evolved into a new creation. The children have been busy painting it and reimagining it into a police and fire engine submarine! We explored how we could write this on our submarine and the children had a go at writing the different letters in the paint. Another child suggested that we needed some numbers painted too, but which numbers? “999!” one of the children exclaimed. So, we all had a turn painting a number 9 on our police fire engine submarine. The children then all practiced writing and recognising numerals on our whiteboards as well as writing their own names, some even doing this independently!
We hope you all have had wonderful weeks too and have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham