Our Week in the Forest...
This week was frightfully exciting! With the weather being so variable, so was the children's play! We went from dry sand castles, to extremely muddy puddles overnight. We love the variety of weather that we get in the forest, it helps us view the sunny days with deep appreciation and the rainy ones teach us how to appreciate the magic of puddles, becoming more creative and resilient!
At Paradise this week, we were utilising having access to the yurt as much as we could. We had the log burner roaring hot, surrounded by blankets and stories. Cosy around the fire we had some regular loved stories told, and even some from the heart, all washed down with gorgeous hot chocolates and warm apple juices. This week we have been building creative structures, stacking and piling up different resources that we could find! ‘Can we make it any higher this time?’, ‘That might make it topple over!’.
At the Windmill forest, we have continued to use last week’s influence of the pumpkin hunt, and created our own pumpkins to play with! We used the saw as a group to make wood cookies, then painted and numbered them to make pumpkins. This was very inspiring for our Little Forest Folk-ers and they began to mark make on their own cookies with a variety of paints!
With Halloween creeping up on Wednesday, we had some frightful visits from some very spooky characters such as the duo of skeleton witches and a ghastly ghost! Some children began to imagine and construct their own ideas of fancy dress, one favourite was a ‘2-legged goat!’ - very scary! In the afternoon all the witches, wizards, goats, penguins, skeletons and pumpkins gathered together with Sam and created their own personal potion with a magical spell. Halloween was very fun indeed!
As always, we have been listening to the children and following their interests. Some children mentioned enjoying ‘wood cookie play’ and the educators put their thinking caps on to make some number cookies, which has encouraged a lot of number and creativity play in the forest. Lots of children enjoyed hiding and searching for numbers, ordering numbers, recognising numbers and generally continuing the theme of treasure hunts! They later developed the number cookies into ‘squirrel nuts.’ Thus, learning about squirrels collecting nuts and planting them all over the forest so that come winter, they can dig them back up and eat them during this time. The ‘children squirrels’ were so enthusiastic and exceptional at hiding their nuts, that even the educators have struggled to find a ‘nut’ or two!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth