Rainbow season is upon us, and as piercing autumn sunlight passed through the random bouts of dark cloud drizzle, we began the week by seeing a glorious ginormous double rainbow to the east behind the Bowling Club. Children chanted out colours and played below, invigorated by the awesome sight! Ideas around colour and shape were extended throughout the week by Simon, who brought in a large resin prism. Everybody has been enthralled and excited by the triangular darts of colour dancing across hands as it was manoeuvred and twisted around in the low hanging afternoon sunlight. Here, children could experiment with the prism themselves, holding it up to their eyes and laughing at the new peculiar, inverted world around them, decorated in rainbow colours!
In the forest this week, the air seemingly moved as the leaves swung and drifted down all around us, playing in the glorious soundtrack of swaying swishing branches. Below us, a shifting sea of colourful leaf litter and twigs has given us all plenty of great new opportunities to have fun. Inspired by the scurrying spiders we are seeing everywhere now; children have been supported to create their own cobwebs. Here, a selection of wool and twine were chosen to loop and tie in a spiral pattern around three carefully selected sticks from a collection and all these sculptures looked great. With similar skills children have also been finding their own natural parts to design a variety of mini beasts. Here, spiders and other bugs have been created by tying and wrapping bits together that were soon being used in play. In other ways, some children have been creating static masterpieces by gluing and sellotaping natural materials onto paper. Katie also dug up some clay for these activities this week, which also really helped the children create their vision as they poked ginormous oak leaves and thin sticks into hand-rolled clay insect bodies, as wings and antennae.
The creativity continued as pumpkins punctured by educators were decorated with several dozen sticks poking out like hair, adorned in leaves and string to great effect! Other pumpkins were used as slimy sensory experiences as children scooped out the pulpy seed mass inside which was thoroughly enjoyed. Naturally, we used the opportunity to separate out the seeds, with a plan to have some of our very own pumpkins growing out on the Bowling Field to harvest for play this time next year!
This week, we were also able to go on our very first adventure walk of the term, which the entire team and children were incredibly excited about. After the adventures down the windy paths and through undergrowth, discovering the world around us, we all revelled in the joy of launching ourselves down the legendary Sunny Hill. At practically forty-five degrees, the speeds built up here really test the balancing skills and awareness of self within space; the gleaming smiles that whizz by tell us it’s always incredible fun. By the end of the trek, educators were exceptionally impressed with the endurance on show, given the distances and terrains travelled; we can’t wait to get go on more of these walks every single week moving forward.
We hope you all have a great weekend, soaking up a few more autumn sun rays and having some rest before the adventures of next week!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth