The first full day of rain this season fell upon our hood clad heads this week, but drips, puddles and rivers make it just as fun as any other day, if not more so! Children adapted loose parts like a shopping basket and a plank into surfboards and pretended to be surfing on large waves, at first paddling flat and then jumping into impressive stances! Educators certainly learnt a thing or two about pro-surfing! Elsewhere, felled logs became boats and canoes as safe bases to jump onto from surrounding sharks, with Simon doing quite a spectacular shark impression. Similarly, Matt played the part of a multi tentacled Squid Monster, who has made an appearance across the sites before, but is particularly more squid like in the rain! By immersing themselves in roleplay, the educators are able to help the children to extend their play, whilst increasing the potential for excellent learning moments in a fun manner.
Inclement weather, naturally, does present challenges but younger children are beginning to adapt their behaviour to look out for their friends as well as themselves. As an example, the children know to help each other find woolly hats in hoods as needed and will help to adjust and pull hats around and down to fit properly. This week we even observed an excellent moment when an older child helped a younger child put gloves on by first advising to make a “starfish shape” with the hand and then by moving any errant fingers into the right spaces; absolutely inspiring care and teamwork! We saw further great ingenious teamwork in a queue line for the tippy tap when a sudden burst of rain came down. Here, children were supported to help the child in front of them put their hoods on, which transformed a routine helpful process into a playful moment of sweet camaraderie.
Teamwork of a different sort has also occurred on adventure walks with one team using arrows to help mark the route that they led on. Alongside useful maps that some children drew to denote where the arrows were, children were able to retrace their steps with support, by looking out for the red felt arrows to get back to the forest school setting. Here the children all played various parts of equal importance in reaching their goal which was brilliant. Map making is an extremely useful tool as a bridge between role-play, literacy and numeracy as it assists children to express their thoughts in the form of mark making. Even what might be thought of as “scribbles” created by our youngest little learners, are in-fact considered as graphics that hold meaning and importance as an expression of their wonderful world.
Maybe this weekend at home you could make more maps which could be used, under the child’s direction, to reach their desired goal; it really is a lot of fun! We hope you all have a good weekend and we can’t wait to hear about the adventures you’ve had next week!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth