Our Week in the Forest...
This week the children have made minibeasts out of clay, they set traps and caught educators, they wrote stories and acted them out on stage, they’ve been on adventure walks, they’ve made fruit skewers and they’ve had lots and lots of fun!
It’s been such an enjoyable week where we’ve had so many varied activities, and a large part of this is down to our holiday campers. They often bring new ideas with them to the forest or have in mind things they would like to do, and more often than not, our regulars love to join in. One area where our Little Forest Folk-ers were streaks ahead though, was in tying knots. It’s always a favourite game for the children (and the reason why educators don’t need gym memberships) to catch the educators and practise their knot tying! Our children have become really adept at tying them and they happily shared their knowledge with the older holiday campers. The children love being able to share this sort of knowledge and it’s a great way for them to develop their communication skills, problem solving skills and team working skills.
We’ve done lots of story-telling this week, especially at Paradise. The main reason for this being the children can then act out their stores on the stage. No matter how short or long the stories, the children love taking part, and those who didn’t quite fancy getting up on stage took such pride in seeing their story being acted out by others.
Quite often our holiday campers can be a little unsure of picking up minibeasts, but it doesn’t take long for them to get stuck in, looking under rocks and logs to find squirming worms, scurrying woodlouse and slimy slugs. It prompted lots of discussion about habitats and life cycles and it led to us creating our own minibeasts out of clay; some designed minibeast like the ones we had found in the forest while other children turned into Dr Frankenstein, creating bugs that only their imaginations could dream up.
We’ve had a brilliant week where the children’s interests have dictated the activities we carried out; we have merely just opened the doors for the children to go explore and find the right answers. We hope you all have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth