This week, our persistence with the “Rain Rain go away” nursery rhyme finally paid off, and we were rewarded with glorious (for the season) weather on World Book Day this Thursday! We appreciate that dressing up for forest school can be a little tricky around all the important layers of clothing, so it was great to see all efforts great and small. Jemima flew in across the common field as a convincing Tinkerbell and brought in wands for the children to play with. This naturally led us to make even more wands for everyone else who wanted one. Here, children found sticks they liked, and were supported to identify the curved and rounded holly leaves, rather than the spiky ones, which they helped to bind to the ends of their wands. Educators were then all magically turned into frogs, slugs and even a carrot, with an Oscar potentially due for the carrot impression. Matt came as a parrot, who makes an appearance on the front cover of “Snail on the Whale” and can be found in hundreds and thousands of other stories if you keep your eyes peeled! Everyone loved mixing and making food for him that he could peck away at with his long yellow beak, and Matt, method acting to the end, thoroughly enjoyed repeating everything everyone said all day long.
Books are the pathway to excellent moments of learning and development, and we love how the children see beyond the physical quality of books affected by the great outdoors. A great story, delivered well, is a great story and we see that the children here are always enjoying old and new stories alike; engrossed and highly engaged with awesome questions and excellent ideas in conversation too.
Earlier this week, the rain was heavy, the most we may have had this year in fact, but as ever children pushed through the perception and misconception that rain isn’t nice and had plenty of fun on the Bowling Field and in the Forest. Pancake Day was exceptionally inspiring, and we all loved making the sloppiest, slimiest, slurpiest, slushiest pancakes the world has ever seen. We even tried to flip some, which took several pairs of hands, but the pancake just flopped out and went SPLAT which everybody found hilarious…so we did it again, and again and again!
As ever, as we play through these rainy days, we see the resilience of the children increase exponentially as they adapt their ways to manage all the changes to the environment and it’s wonderful to see, jolly well-done little ones!
We hope you have a fab weekend, and we look forward to hearing all about it soon!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth