What a wonderful week we have had in the forest. At the start of the week, our educators transformed one part of our forest into The Little Forest Folk train station! Underground trains pulled in for repair and ticket inspectors sold tickets and announced, “This train is now ready to depart!” The children sat in crates, one behind each other and rode the forest train all the way to Waterloo! Choo-Choo!
We spent some time refreshing our music area this week. Metal lids and tins were hung on a rope and we carefully threaded plastic bottle tops through wool using toothpicks, which made a really interesting sound when they crashed into a saucepan. The eco council thought this was a great way to reuse and recycle some of our old mud kitchen equipment and it’s also lots of fun to create sounds and rhythms too!
Some of our Little Forest Folk-ers enjoyed a spot of sailing this week. Boats and oars were made out of our crates and sticks, and the children sailed across some leftover muddy puddles! This prompted a spontaneous sing-along to “row, row, row, your boat.”
Our rope and crates were turned in to an obstacle course. The children crawled under and leaped over. We even pretended to be spies and slowly manoeuvred ourselves through the course, if the rope was touched it would set off an alarm! There was a lot of problem solving and fixing when the rope was too high or too low, so the children also got to work as a team and practise their tying and untying.
Our Little Forest Folk also had some fun gathering sand to create our own forest sandpit. The children found stones and rocks hidden inside and used some of our mud kitchen resources to build mountains and castles in the sand.
We got creative too and drew some beautiful houses. The children drew squares with triangles on the top for the roof. Some of us drew our families inside, others drew windows and rooms with very pretty furniture. We got to take them home to show our families too.
Our favourite bookshop was set up in the forest this week, selling all our favourite stories. The children pretended to be shopkeepers asking their customers what book they would like, scanning and typing and then putting the books in a bag. This encouraged a lot of independent reading where the stories were retold from the pictures.
We love bug hunting here at Twickenham and this week we continued our interest by finding a leopard slug underneath our arts and crafts table. Sticks were used to measure his length. He was almost two sticks long! Some children watched as he slithered off into the brambles leaving a sticky trail behind him.
We also got explosive by making our very own clay volcanoes and joining in with a science experiment. Educators helped as we made the volcanoes, making sure to put a hole in the top, we then added food colouring, turmeric and bicarb together inside each volcano. Carefully vinegar was poured on top and BOOM, volcanic eruption! The volcanoes fizzed and bubbled and made larva streams. They really enjoyed the messy play the clay and ingredients left behind too. The turmeric and vinegar made our forest smell very interesting for the rest of the day!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham