Our Week in the Forest...
If you stepped into our forest this week you may have been met by a menagerie of wild animals. The face paints were requested this week and our children loved being transformed into butterflies, cats, tigers, fairies and even an Elsa/Anna princess who was also a unicorn! This inspired a lot of role play as our tiger cubs chased and roared at one another and our butterflies ran through the forest and made homes in the trees.
One of the things that the children loved about face painting was looking into the mirrors. Children were fascinated by their reflections and the different facial expressions they could pull. Children were even holding the mirrors up so their friends could also look at their reflections and there was a real sense of children helping each other.
Virginia spotted this moment of fascination with the mirrors and thought this was a good opportunity to extend the experience. With the help of Virginia and Lizzie the children began reflecting on emotions and how they can change our facial expressions (and how we show others how we are feeling). Children made happy faces with their reflections, scared faces, bored faces, angry faces and surprised faces. Children then used craft paints to make different faces that can be used as props to help communicate their feelings with educators in the forest.
We are seeing some lovely examples of empathy in the forest between our children this week too, with even our younger children trying to help their friends who fell in the mud or toppled off logs. We really have some caring young personalities developing and we can't wait to continue to watch them grow. However, when Xiao took a dive in the mud, this caused side splitting laughter and shouts of "do it again Xiao!"
There has been mud in abundance this week and Lizzie made some lovely laminated recipe cards for mud pie, mud cupcakes and mud flapjack and hung them in our mud kitchen and we had groups of children really enjoy measuring out "4 cups of mud, 2 cups of water and 10 chopped leaves". Of course the real fun occurred when they came off recipe and began making up their own recipes and the team had lots of gorgeous mud pies and cupcakes to feast on. There was even a mud tea which was very thick but super sweet with the addition of stick bark...yum!
We hope you all have a lovely weekend and hope you all have some muddy adventures of your own.
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham