The warming yellow glow of sunlight enabled different activities this week and as the puddles began to dry around us, children on Green team found that they were missing a vital ingredient for muddy potions, cakes, and construction; water! After discussing where water comes from, it’s uses and where it goes, the children soon decided that they should use an adventure walk to find and collect some water to bring back to the forest site to play with. The explorers soon set off on their adventure to locate a suitable source, and Dan brought along empty two litre bottles for the task too. Meandering through the forest at various spots are several trickling streams and after identifying that some were just not deep enough to get the bottle in, children eventually settled on a effervescent flow of “loud” water. Dan scooped the water out to much delight and the water was enjoyed back at the Forest site.
Both teams continue to love their adventure walks and this week records have been broken for amount of time spent out hiking in one go. On Tuesday Red team went right up over the sun-soaked Sunny Hill and continued on a loop that lasted one and a half hours! They found brick constructions we believe were old underground storage locations and a monument to military regiments where carved letters and numbers enabled lots of talk about people and countries all over planet earth. Here, some children noticed familiar letters like those in their own name, and, is often the case, also proudly identifying parents’ initials or “m” and “d” for all you absolutely adored mummies and daddies! Younger children were really keen and excited to see what their initials or age looked like too, which highlights the value of using text in the real world to help development in this area.
Construction is often a key part of the day around here, and this week Green team made much use of a pulley system to haul building materials inside a milk crate. Great imaginations also helped to pretend that the milk crate was actually an elevator lift, stopping off at several floors inside a building to drop off shopping. This enabled great number chat as well as conversations around food where Educators were able to scaffold support to help children recognise that some food shared the same initial as their own name. Soon there was plenty of laughter finding out that some children shared the same letters as eggs, tomatoes and fudge!
Similarly, on Red team, construction is constant, and one morning children felt that the obstacle course we had made was “too easy”, so they were challenged to create something they felt was a little more appropriate for their awesome physical skills. Great carrying teamwork ensued, with lots of perseverance to pick up the weighty planks and push the lumpy logs into the right place. Educators were particularly impressed with the way a plank was wedged inside a tyre to create a ramp that tilted down once body weight was shifted across it. The end of this ramp then landed onto the start of a “bridge”, so some rather excellent balancing and confidence was needed to complete this part of the new course! The children decided that if they stepped off the parts of the course then they had to start again, but with absolute can-do attitude everyone did so well getting round to jump off the final part into the “squishy” leaf net.
With another fab week finished, we hope you are able to enjoy this patch of better weather and have similar fun yourselves this weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth