This week the children have all been very creative in their constructions. We’ve had some very elaborate and wonderful places made within our forest including our very own Forest School train station. The children laid out planks of wood parallel to each other to create a train track and put sticks in between to create the sleepers that join the tracks together. The children then placed lines of crates on top of their tracks to be their trains, while others got to work on creating a platform using pallets as well as a ticket booth for all the train tickets. We then used treasure we found within the forest to pay for our train tickets and the conductor came along and checked them all before the train set off for an island!
On other days, our Little Forest Folk-ers have been building homes for all of our insect friends. Upon going on a Learning Walk, the children discovered lots of woodlice and even an ants' nest and this inspired them to create some homes for them to move into within our own forest. Logs were collected and stacked in some dark and shady areas that the children thought the woodlice might like and so soon we will be checking to see if any have moved in. We’ve also been creating some wonderful spider webs. With the rain making them glisten this week, the children have noticed how intricate they are. They had turns in creating their own webs by spinning and twirling as they wrapped white wool around logs in order to catch all of the flies. Another big creation this week has been the fascination of factories. We’ve had train ticket factories where children cut out paper tickets and wrote on them, robot factories with robots marching and even a wonderful 3-Dimensional factory artwork created with the help of friends. They made pretend battery packs, robots, chimneys and rooms that they set out on the giant cardboard to create their robot factory.
With the weather being a wonderful mix of wet and dry this week, the children have had endless fun in making the most of all the different weathers. With the heavy rain, deep puddles formed, and crates were stacked with planks of wood to create diving boards. 3, 2, 1… SPLASH! The children dived into the deepest puddles creating the biggest splashes. Other children decided they would be just like actual divers and began to spin as they jumped to perform beautiful diving tricks. The mud was also perfect for making thick chocolate sauce to go on top of their pasta dishes as they used their hands to explore, squelching it between their fingers until it rested on top of plates of leaves. With our wonderful architects in the forest, various bridges were constructed across the different puddles. We had some that were up high, with wood balanced on crates, steppingstones made out of bricks and others were some floating leaves which we tested out and sadly, they sank when standing on them. As the week went on, the mud began to dry a little and thicken up. This then became perfect for mark making within the forest. The children used sticks to scrape marks to create shapes, pictures and even some letters for their names!
There were many fascinations this week with writing and stories. All the children loved listening to all the usual fairy-tale stories, but some children now ask for them to be different and suggest what might change in the story. This includes what I think is my new favourite, “Bling-derella” a very new take on Cinderella. The children have all been creating wonderful helicopter stories this week which the educators love to hear and write. Some of the younger children are getting involved and engaged in the helicopter stories now as they look to our story stones for inspiration. Counting out and choosing 5 stones to talk about that might have a person, place, event or object on it to include in their story.
The eco-school this week have been teaching their friends all about recycling and have engaged everyone into conversations about their bins at home. We’ve learned all about what goes in which bins in everyone’s houses and then decided to collect up all of our recycling in the forest and take it to the big recycling bins. All the children took turns putting paper, card and plastic into the correct part of the bin.
We hope you all have a wonderful long weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham