Our Week in the Forest...
Last week we saw the arrival of tadpoles to our site and throughout this week we have been learning the full story of the life cycle of frogs. Most days we have headed to the lake to check on the development of our wriggly friends to see what stage they have developed into. We have also been lucky enough to enjoy a fantastic journey to the Isabella plantations in Richmond Park. At our sites, we have been enjoying constructing skeletons using sticks, developing our tool work and using our creations in play.
Spring is such a fun time to be in the forest. We have been visiting the lake on a regular basis recently and the children have been talking about the nests and the near arrival of eggs and chicks. This week the children noticed two very fluffy creatures bobbing on the surface – our first cygnets of the year!
The children have been really enjoying using the tools. This week we used the big bow saw to create skittle blocks. As we use our tools, we like to talk about the life of the tree and discuss how the tree has grown, the type of bark it has and more. The children counted the rings on our skittles and estimated that our skittles were around 11 years of age. The children have been very interested in trajectory schema themed activities and we incorporated this into the planning of the activity. The children threw the skittle underarm into the tower in a controlled environment to encourage the practice of throwing safely.
An intriguing activity that we carried out this week was building a human skeleton using sticks off the ground. The children were provided an image of a skeleton and were asked to create the skeleton as a team. The children worked fantastically as a group and quickly found their own roles. Using high levels of communication and speaking skills the children delegated tasks to each other to collect distinct length sticks for precise body parts. We had our builders and our collectors and finished with a full skeleton!
Our trip to the Isabella plantations in Richmond park was magical. The children loved walking through the many alleyways of beautiful flowers incorporating mathematics into their conversation by counting the number of colours and shapes they could see. We also had an insect hunt on a giant scale, the usual friends were found straight away; slugs, snails and worms. But we were even lucky enough to find a young grasshopper! Animals were a definite theme of the day as the children loved meeting the mandarin and mallard ducklings. We were even lucky enough to view Deer which opened a discussion on why some Deer have antlers and others do not. It was a really fun day and we look to revisiting Isabella plantation in the near future!
Next week is Half Term which means holiday camp. We look forward to welcoming our returning and new friends with us. See you next week!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth