Our Week in the Forest...
Our first full week of 2020 back in the Forest has been a delight! It has been wonderful to see each other again, with big hugs all round, to share stories of fun had over the holidays and to get back on site together and see what has changed over the holiday period.
The big excitement on this front has been the discovery of hundreds of spring bulbs starting to poke their green tips through our well trampled earth. This has led to a bit of a change in where we are playing, to allow the flowers to flourish. As always, the children have demonstrated amazing adaptability, adjusting to the changes in our environment with their typical ease and curiosity. We’re all looking forward to seeing what the bulbs turn out to be, and to enjoying a blanket of flowers when spring arrives! There have been a number of moments this week where I’ve found myself simply watching a beautiful hub of activity going on around me with a gigantic grin on my face.
Earlier in the week, at the request of the children, we had the paints out. I had decided only to put the primary colours out, to give a chance for them to experiment with colour mixing, as well as giving them the freedom to make their own shades of colour. This meant that we only had three pots of paint out, despite having around twelve children all keen to get their creative juices flowing. You might expect that this would have resulted in disagreements and arguments aplenty, however, in true Little Forest Folk style, what transpired was a beautiful hour of peaceful, collaborative, creative outpouring.
We talked about how the paint pots didn’t belong to any one person in particular and how if you wanted to use a colour someone else was using, all you needed to do was ask. And so the grownups watched on, as, from our very youngest to our very oldest children, they shared and created happily alongside each other, chatting away, concentrating intensely, with the adults watching on in delight as our forest was transformed into a colourful array of beautiful mark-making adventures. The logs lining our paths became rainbow snakes, the table awash with colour, the fire-engine-pallet-house possibly the most colourful fire-engine ever seen, the tyres meticulously painted according to their different tread patterns and a few colourful faces around too!
Another 'wow' moment was when the older children, who had been playing racing cars, decided they wanted to create a race track too. I suggested we use the various planks of different sizes to create one. I moved the first plank, and before I knew it, without any educator input, I looked round to see one of our youngest children and one of our oldest children working together to lift what was a frankly enormous plank of wood and add it to the end of the growing race track. In the space of a few minutes, without educator guidance, the children had worked together to create a track about twenty metres long, finishing at our fox alarm (a metal bin lid hung between two trees), so that they could use it as a bell to say when they had finished! Much fun was then had balancing and racing along the planks at high speed and taking turns to use the stopwatch to see how long they had taken.
Wonderfully, such moments of unbridled creativity, collaboration and fun are simply part and parcel of our days in the forest, and to list them all would be impossible. It’s a joy and privilege to be part of these learning, playing adventures. So, at the end of our first week of 2020, we want to say a big thank you to all our Little Forest Folk-ers for your unending curiosity and your hunger to learn and create: we look forward to sharing many more moments of wonder in the year ahead!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham