Our Week in the Forest...
Brr! Autumn has really arrived this week. There has been a nip in the air and those new fleecy waterproofs have really been coming into their own. If only us adults could squeeze into them…
Over in the forest this week we have had beautiful golden sunlight glinting through the trees and lots more autumnal leaves on the ground. The children have loved crunching through the leaves and showering them over one another’s freshly washed hair. Sorry about that! They have also discovered the joys of burying one another under the leaves. Very zombie-esque for Halloween! We have seen some excellent team work in trying to accomplish this.. ‘Cover the feet!’ ‘We need more leaves here; I can see a hand!’ The ‘buried’ have also had to work hard on their trust and patience as they have tried to lie very still whilst the busy workers have gathered the leaves for the professional cover-uppers. All before shrieks of joy as the leaves are shaken off and the fun can begin again. It is terrific to see the growing independence of the children in using their imaginations to create their own games, whilst also developing their communication to work with one another and have the best time!
The play at Paradise has developed this week with children’s imaginations really being stretched. What started as one child’s joyful cry that they were an astronaut (what a fab word for a two year old!), led to a band of children wanting to head off in to space. This led to a fun number challenge of learning how to count down from 10 to BLAST OFF! Once in space and floating around, the children decided that they needed a rocket. They set about moving planks and working together to move them into position. Some children gathered smaller wood cut offs to become the buttons inside the rocket. ‘I’m pressing the button to go up! It’s going up now!’
It was super to see all the mathematical language being used in such an exciting context through their play. Once we had blasted off the children were eager to point out what they could see- ‘Mars!’, ‘Seven stars!, ‘No, I can see eight stars!’. It wasn’t long before they had inputted a route to ‘Ice Cream Planet’ on their navigation system. This also involved complex shouts and button pressing for ‘Going down’ and to ‘Open the doors!’, before they could buy their space ice creams, including an inventive order of ‘Sausage ice cream’ for the astrodog!
Thank you all for another glorious week in the forest! Who knows where the imaginations of our Little Forest Folk will take us next week…
Have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth