It’s been a mixed week of weather in the forest this week from bright sunshine to rain and even some snow! The children have loved exploring in all the different weathers and noticed the difference the weather makes to how muddy the forest is.
When we came back to the Forest on Tuesday, we had a little search for our Easter Eggs we had made last week. We searched high and low and eventually discovered them hiding underneath some of our crates. Someone had cut them as if they had cracked and out had hatched some cardboard chicks! We counted 1, 2, 3 and 4 of them and thought that they couldn’t stay hiding underneath the crates as it wasn’t a very comfy house. So, the children did a splendid job of creating some nests for the chicks. They collected together sticks, leaves and mud as they knew that that was how birds made their nests and pretended to make some yummy food for the chicks made out of some delicious stones. What wonderful caring the children did.
We also had a little move around of our camp this week, and when we moved our cotton real, we found so many worms hiding underneath! The children were fascinated by all the worms they found, big ones, little ones, thin ones and fat ones. There were so many that the children counted to 20 but there were still so many more. We watched them closely as they dug back into the ground and then the children decided we needed to go on a bug hunt. We decided we would only turn one log at a time to not disturb all of the insects at once and we discovered lots of woodlice, some millipedes and even a slug. We’ve also began to see in the warmer weather some of the bees from next door come to visit the flowers in the forest. We have been talking all about how we can care for the bees and that they collect pollen from the flowers and make honey.
Dinosaurs have been an absolute favourite this week with all of the children. We’ve had pretend chasing games where our friends pretended to be dinosaurs and others had to run away. A wonderful dinosaur land was illustrated by a group of children complete with a T-rex and pterodactyl, the children really thought about the dinosaur’s environment and added trees, rocks and flowers as well as rain and thunder and lightning to the dinosaur land. The Educators helped the children write out helicopter stories at the top of the dinosaur lands and this sparked some wonderful creativity. The children started creating special jokes for the dinosaurs as they find different things funny to humans. We then decided to recreate our dinosaur land in the forest with twigs as trees, rocks as boulders and leaves for the dinosaurs to eat. We coloured in and cut out some carboard dinosaurs too to live in our forest. We’ve even talked about some new words such as carnivore, herbivore and omnivore and then used them throughout the week in their dinosaur play.
The eco school council this week has been teaching their friends how to plant flowers and look after them. They’ve been taking their friends to water all of our plants and trees with the watering cans they had made and explained how the trees are bigger so need lots of water, but the little flowers only need a little. We also enjoyed decorating the plant pots of our new flowers to make our gardening section extra beautiful.
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham