Starting the week with spectacular amounts of sunshine in the great outdoors is wonderful! Sunshine means shadows; whether long, tall, wide, or short our children love them and earlier this week we wobbled our wiggly limbs and did dangly dances with our “friends on the floor”. This helps us to find out and solidify understanding of the names of the parts of the body, with real-time animations of our own moving parts. These moments of fun learning were rounded off by epic shadow chasing games and Matt’s shadow is still aching from all the sprinting!
With this observed interest in mind, and clear enjoyment last month of the puppet theatre, Dan saw fit to make a shadow puppet theatre at both sites this week. By suspending a white sheet, children could perform using their hands and arms or just dance away in the sunshine. Children also enjoyed finding loose parts around the forest floor to hold up and experiment with shape and pattern. Throughout, Dan filmed the shows and let the children watch back. This helps to support a sense of self and ability, whilst giving us all time to reflect on our expressive achievements in order to change or improve the performative approach.
Serious sunrays mean serious water play, and children eagerly helped to fill our ginormous hole in the bowling field on Monday! With shoes and wellies off, trousers rolled up and all the receptacles readied, children were soon having a whale of a time scooping, filling, and pouring all day long. With splashes a plenty, this was the place to be, and it was without a doubt enjoyed by everyone.
Over in the forest water play continued, with sieve and slide constructions set up in the morning for children to enjoy. One way we can identify children’s interests is by observing the various Schema’s being used in play, which is the way in which children attach themselves to their favourite motions to experiment. So here, with these setups we are helping the younger children satisfy their clear need to scoop or fill, then transport and pour. For the older children, these are the perfect places to begin using the language of measure and to consider more effective ways of manoeuvring materials around or even design and make their own water chute constructions.
Over in the art corner, Jemima, Vanessa, and Katie have been helping all the children make their own walkie-talkies as they have been fascinated by the mechanics of our own. The air has been filled with chatter of children radioing through to Mummies, Daddies, big sisters, baby brothers, the birds in the trees and the slugs on the logs, to tell them all about their day so far. The children have also used their walkie talkies to talk to us too. This has been a brilliant way to get to know about all the people and things that they hold dear to them and is a great way for children to understand more about who we are and what we like, in a highly playful way that helps our new bonds grow deeper. So, whilst every sentence now seems to end in the word “over”, this has been another grand week! Over.
Have a brilliant weekend and we’ll see you all soon!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth