Our Week in the Forest...
It has been a very exciting week in the forest with the arrival of our holiday camper friends and the onset of the electric storms! We always enjoy the arrival of the holiday campers as they provide fresh ideas and points of view that only slightly older children can know. This knowledge and interest rubs off on our Little Forest Folk-ers who look up to the older role models! We have had an engaging week carrying out extensive mini-beast hunts, playing monsters with a bit of hide and seek, and learning about lightning storms and thunder!
Our little Forest Folk-ers are always such adept insect hunters and over the last weeks we have been lucky enough to find a range of animals in our forest. This week we continued our luck finding a small family of toads under a log, who kindly let us admire and talk about them until we put them back in their home. This week the children have been very interested in making more links between the insects they find and mathematics. Our holiday campers helped the intrepid explorers to count the number of limbs or body parts on an insect – talking amongst the group to confirm that they have got it right. Then they used a book to identify the insects and to confirm what they thought the creature was! Looking through the book the children were recognising letters and sounds to confirm that it was the right insects name!
We have been continuing to revisit the lake this week due to the excitement of the spring arrivals. The children noticed straight away that some of the tadpoles looked different. “It’s got legs!”. Our little tadpoles are in the second stage of metamorphosis and we look forward to seeing how they are doing next week! After meeting our cygnet friends last week, the children were really eager to feed them. So, we took a tub of oats for the children to feed the cygnets with – the children were amazed at how big their feet were! It was great to see how comfortable the cygnets and children were with each other!
On Tuesday, we had our first electrical storm that we have experienced at the Wandsworth site. The children coped with the noise and showed very good listening and attentiveness when we decided to evacuate the site. When safely inside, our children were fascinated to hear about lightning. We cleared up that the sound of thunder is the result of the flash of lightning and we spent some of our time drawing our very own lightning pictures (some of our friends were even a little disappointed that there wasn’t a thunderstorm on Thursday!).
Have a lovely weekend everybody and we will see you all again next week!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth