Our Week in the Forest...
We’ve had a lovely week in the forest, and although the weather hasn’t been able to decide what it wants to do, the children have loved it!
The rain brought with it lots of muddy puddles so the children enjoyed extra-long adventure walks in the morning, searching the common for puddles to splash in. The children experimented with sticks and stones, seeing which would float or make the biggest splash. We hosted the Splash Olympics where our Little Forest Folk-ers would take a running jump to produce the biggest splash as possible. These activities help the children to form an understanding of weight and volume and capacity, and although we don’t use words like this with most of our children, when it comes to later in life they will be able to think back to the time when the heavy stones sank the quickest and how the biggest objects made the biggest splashes.
The rain has also made the mud ideal for mark making. Whether it be with sticks or fingers it has been the perfect texture for drawing shapes, building roads, writing our names or making mazes. Some weeks we have certain interests or themes that seem to run from Monday to Friday, other weeks, each day, we do something different; this week was the latter. The children are always fascinated by the educator’s walkie talkies and how they’re used to communicate with one another, so another activity the children really enjoyed was to create their own. This led to lots of exciting roleplay where we had police officers and paramedics and even extra forest school educators charging around the forest. On Thursday we had a very special visit from Christy’s puppy dachshund. It was a lovely opportunity for all the children to have a cuddle and discuss how we care for not only puppies, but baby brothers and sisters which led to lots of discussions about families.
It’s been a week with a huge variety of activities for the children to join in with. They’ve also climbed, swung, sang, acted, counted and much, much more. We hope you all have had a lovely week too and have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth