This has been the first week of longer days for lots of our new starters and we are all incredibly proud and inspired by the bravery, resilience, and happiness on show in the absence of all you lovely Mummy’s and Daddy’s! Well done to all of our new parents on what may also be some of your first days away from your wonderful children; we recognise it may be a big new transition for you too!
Whilst it has been a shorter week, it’s been no less fun than usual, and we expect and have heard that some children may have been telling you about some of the things they have done already. So, with this newsletter, we thought it might be helpful to talk about some of the rules that help us all have a great and a safe time, that we’ve seen the children beginning to instinctively apply to play already.
The Forest School rules are a prominent part of the morning, that follow the joyous “hello song” at the log circle where we all learn and celebrate each other’s names before snack. We don’t necessarily have an order, but we might suggest that our favourite to start is “Be kind and gentle”, where we talk about being kind to each other, the animals, the plants, and the trees. It has already been wonderful to hear all the children list plenty of forest creatures that we need to be kind to and with squirrels scurrying and wood pigeons plodding around us it’s so easy to show children how happy the animals are in this beautiful environment too.
This rule may then lead into “No shaking and no breaking” as it partly refers to being kind to the plants and the trees by not damaging them. Here we explain that “deadwood” from the floor can absolutely be crumbled into “cakes”, heaped into “hot chocolate”, mashed into “mud pies”, or really anything their imaginations can think of. From here, our older children this week, were then able to help Matt with the rules by letting everyone know that if we break the branches on bushes “then the bugs won’t have a home”, which is lovely to hear.
Next, with the sticks around us we may have just snapped, Educators might then model “the no picking no licking rule” by playfully pretending to eat “a sandwich” (sticks between leaves), to which all the older children shout “NNNNOOOOOOOOOO”! This always creates a great highly involved group discussion about how if we put things in our mouths from the forest floor, we could get a poorly tummy. This week, on our daily Forest site safety checks, Dan has found a few mushrooms, which he roped off. It’s in this “no pick no lick” rule that we were able to use a real-world example of something to be careful of, and we were again delighted that our older children were able to tell us that if they found a mushroom, they would tell an educator.
There are a few more rules, but we believe these three are a solid introduction to them; if your children do mention these, then we hope with this information you may be able to join in on their conversations in a way that values and supports their ideas about playing safely to have even more fun!
We hope you have a great weekend, and we’re sure that if you’re out and about in the great outdoors your children may even be able to help you have an even greater time using some of these Forest School Rules!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth