Our Week in the Forest...
We are exploring further, in more detail and with more vigour than ever before here at Wandsworth. Both on site and on our amazing adventure walks, the children’s thirst for fun and exploration is on point. One of the key interests has been looking at knot tying and the application of the knots for specific needs. Elsewhere the use of clay has been rife as the children have been creating their own mud faces using a variety of materials they have been finding in the forest around them.
We continue to split the children into a variety of different groups in the morning to enable the children more space to thrive. On our amazing adventure walks, the children have shown us their stamina that they have built up over their time at Little Forest Folk. Embarking on 3km treks, exploring hidden gems such as dens tucked into thick bushes where they role play family based activities or ultimate puddle splashing competitions where everybody cheers on their peers to run up and make the biggest splash possible, before letting their friends have a turn. It’s hard to remember that most of the children are only three years old.
Back on site the use of clay has been rife as we use the materials like acorns, leaves and twigs to create little clay monsters that have been stuck to the trees around us. Initially the children scout the forest floor to find materials to add to their monsters to make them unique. When happy with their bounty, they return to the clay station to start manipulating the clay into flat faces, delicately shaping them with the tips of their fingers. They then add their personally found materials onto their ‘monsters’ before splatting them onto the tree. The children loved comparing their monsters and noticing the differences of everyone’s creations.
As a lot of our children love to help out when packing down the climbing and rope equipment, they have become quite knowledgeable in tying knots. They love tying the educators in knots and taking them to various caves and jails on site. Applying their knowledge is a very important skill so the children have been tying ropes to logs to move them around the forest to create different working spots. One very intuitive little one even tied a rope to the big swing to enable safely monitored group helped swinging, enabling the children to help their peers swing in a very safe and fun way!
A lot of our children have been very interested in handwriting over the recent period. We have facilitated this by helping the children write out words of their own choice. The children ask to write a word, and we start by sounding out the letters that they can hear at the beginning and through the word. We then create a dot to dot map of the letters for the children to follow. They then attempt to follow the dot matrix, and we support them if needed. As each letter is written we sound out the letter to reaffirm the association of letters and their sounds.
Have a lovely weekend everybody, see you next week for holiday camp!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth