Our Week in the Forest...
We’ve had such a lovely week in the sun and had lots of interesting activities for the children to take part in. When the weather is nice, it makes it easier to use tools; it’s one of the few occasions in the forest where children will sit very patiently, waiting for their turn, thus the reason we don’t use tools if it’s too wet or too cold. Each site has been set a challenging of cutting 50 tree cookies for the family picnic that’s coming up – these will be used as tokens for the pony rides, and our children have tackled this task with great aplomb.
We decided with the children that for every three they cut, two would go to the picnic and they could choose their favourite to make into whatever they wanted. This week they have been turned into watches. The children always enjoy looking at the different watches the teachers have, and they’re fascinated by our visual timetable, showing the order of the day from snack, to play, to toilet time and home time. With their very own watches they were able to walk around the forest exclaiming that it was half past one or ten past 11 or that it was 15 minutes until snack time. Some of our older children began to understand concepts such as quarter past, half past and quarter to – next week’s challenge is to make hands that move rather than drawing them on!
The children have also enjoyed getting creative, making paper dolls this week. We have a story which is about paper dolls whose names are Ticky and Tacky, Jackie the backie, Jim with two noses and Jo with the bow. The children have loved listening to the story before setting to work to create their own paper creatures, some quite terrifying with missing limbs, several eyes, multiple heads, but all equally loved by the children.
We have also had a beauty salon pop up in the forest where children queued to have their faces painted. The catch was the face paint was invisible! This meant for the less artistically gifted educators, they became the Picasso’s and van Gogh’s of the make-up world. Children requested all sorts of designs, lay back on their log while a mixture of sticks, leaves and feathers were used to create a face paint masterpiece. Hair and nails were also perfected before the children glanced into the pretend mirror and show not pretend, but real delight! We are continually left speechless at how imaginative and creative the children are.
Hope you all enjoy some sunny weekend adventures!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth