We’ve been busy redecorating our camp a little bit this week. We spent some time rebuilding our forest den, practising tying and untying the knots of the string that holds up our trusty tarp. The children discussed which large sticks would be best to make the roof stay up and, ever since, have enjoyed using their den as a restaurant, a prison and many other fun role-playing activities.
The children also all got the chance to make their own wooden mallets. The educators guided them through sawing and using a bill hook to split the wood to make a handle. They got to decide whether they wanted a square handle or a round handle. Afterwards, some of our little forest folkers even took their mallets to the crafting table and painted their mallets bright blue! We spoke about what we could safely use our mallets for and all got to take one home.
Making plant, leaf and flower prints with our hammers was also an activity some of the children had fun with this week. They popped on their protective goggles and made some wonderful patterns. They were fascinated with how the green leaves stained the fabric and the symmetry in their designs.
Some of our little forest folkers set up their own bookshop in our leafy den too. The books were priced and put on display, and signage was made with chalk and small planks from our construction area, to tell their friends if the shop was opened or closed and they had very lovely customer service! They were busy scanning the books at the till they had constructed out of logs and larger planks and taking money (or paying with contactless), and carefully putting them in a paper gift bags that they had found in our recycling box.
We still got to enjoy all our lovely puddles this week that some of children even made into the river thames and a dinosaur swamp. A channel was carved into the mud with a stick to join two larger puddles together which made our lovely local river thames. We also kept nice and dry in our waterproofs whilst playing with our dinosaurs in the muddy puddles, splashing and roaring and feeding them some fallen leaves.
The children have really enjoyed exploring space this week as well. We’ve made planets and painted the whole solar system. We spoke about all of the planets, using some fun songs to remember all their names and then used our paints to paint them around the sun. Some were big and red, and some were smaller and purple. Colours were mixed and circles were drawn really carefully, we even remembered to include the moons. Paintbrushes were also flicked and splatted onto black paper to create the stars in the night sky.
Some of our little forest folkers also were lucky enough to find a fallen elder branch in the forest this week, hiding in our bracken and decided to make some wonderful elder bead jewellery. They helped our educators with the sawing of the spongey wood and popped out beads from the middle that were then carefully threaded on to wool to make necklaces which were worn around the forest with pride.
We have also had lots of more fun with cardboard boxes this week. Some have been used to make paper dolls, planets and shapes. The shapes our children made were then hidden all around our forest and the children went on a shape hunt to find them, naming each shape and recognising the numbers written on them too.
The eco school council have had a busy week repurposing lots of toilet roll tubes into bird (and squirrel) feeders, made with tubes, butter and bird seed. The children gently rolled their tubes in all the ingredients, threaded some wool through and then tried to find a tree for their feeder to hang. We had lots of fun all afternoon pretending to be birds, making bird watching binoculars out of the left-over tubes and quietly watching a magpie and a squirrel eat all our seeds. The next morning everything had been eaten! We have also continued to explore singing our hello song in many other languages, we have been choosing countries based on the current football results.
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham