Our Week in the Forest...
This week the children have made flags, created art pieces with charcoal, baked birthday cakes, rebuilt the damn to block the dinosaur river, celebrated Eid with henna tattoos, designed crowns and swung higher than any child has dared swing before…we have had such a fun week!
The variety each week along with the children’s ever-changing interests and ideas are what make this job so enjoyable. Pretending to be pirates is always high on the agenda so this week at Paradise, the children designed their very own Jolly Rogers. Some decided they wanted the flag one whole colour, while others mixed and matched and added decorations. We had some of the prettiest, friendliest looking pirate flags you will ever see, but with ‘Be kind and gentle’ as a forest rule, we were more than okay with this! We also used charcoal from a campfire this week to draw with. We talked about how charcoal can be used for different things, and the children found it funny that some people use it to whiten their teeth! We experimented by breaking the charcoal up, so we had some bits with finer points and some with thicker. We put paper on smooth clipboards and then tried it on rough bark. Through all this mark making, the children were so engrossed, all the while developing the muscles they need when it comes to writing.
Another of our highlights this week was having the children receive henna tattoos on their hands, on Wednesday, the day after Eid. We have some families who celebrated the festival, and it was a joy to hear how enthusiastically these children talked about the parties they had with their friend and families. Some children opted for more traditional floral henna designs; Christy however was excellent at taking requests. It meant we had trees, starry nights and even dinosaurs!
The children have enjoyed decorating things this week and that meant we had lots of princes, princesses, kings and queens running around the forest in their finest forest crowns. The children cut out the shape, before decorating it with tissue paper or leaves and feathers they found in the forest, or all three. It was lovely to see everyone wearing crowns that made them look just like Max, from ‘Where the Wild Things are’.
We hope you have a lovely weekend and we’ll see you next week for more forest fun!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth