Our Week in the Forest...
Harder, faster, stronger. All of our Little Forest Folkers are getting that little bit bigger and stronger as the weeks go by, so we as educators are creating challenges that are that bit harder for them. The children are now able to go on longer adventure walks in the woods, allowing us to explore in more detail the environment that we live our lives in. We are also happy to say that tool work is going to be introduced more on a daily basis, with the introduction of tools such as pinion drills, bow saws, hack saws, whittling peelers and more.
We have had multiple story themes at Paradise recently - two of the most popular have been The Gingerbread Man, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The caterpillar theme carried over to our first tool demonstration - today we demonstrated Pinon drills. We used our pinon drill to create 8 holes in the body of an arm sized log, two for eyes on the face of the log, and two for antennae. After demonstrating how to safely use the tools at Paradise, always sitting, all spare hands behind your back and always wearing safety gloves. The children went about collecting the perfect sized sticks for our Caterpillar (Eric) legs, eyes and antennae. Needless to say, the children worked so hard to listen and are really eager to start using tools to create and learn.
Over at Windmill it has been a week of very interchangeable weather. The children have used this to their advantage, using the wet weather on Wednesday to create a dinosaur themed river valley and a swimming pool to play with. Also, the children have noticed that they can see lots more insects when it has just rained - so off they go on their mini beat hunts!
Many of our children enjoy the slackline - so we have moved the perpendicular handle rope 6 foot higher and thrown a short length over it at 90 degrees. This forces the children to stand tall and really concentrate on their balance - which really develops their core strength.
We are also finding that the adventure walks that we carry out every day in the forest are becoming longer and more challenging. Exploring through the undergrowth, climbing up steep climbs and having to climb over tricky stumps and logs. It is so much fun delving further into our forest environment.
Have a lovely bank holiday weekend everybody! See you next week.
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth