Our Week in the Forest...
It has been a lovely week at Little Forest Folk, with some greatly-welcomed sunshine breaking through the trees. With the weather being drier, we have had the chance to get the much-loved paints back out. Story books also reappeared on the forest floor for the children to dip into.
There has been lots of creative play at Paradise this week. We covered one of the fences with big sheets of paper, and the children painted streaks of colour all over the surface, working together to create a masterpiece! Sticks and leaves were used instead of paintbrushes and the children observed the different textured effects that these materials created on the paper.
The children enjoyed a Christmas throwback as we created a sleigh out of a wooden crate and log stumps. The crate was the sleigh, with a raised seat at the back and the log stumps represented the reindeer. The children enjoyed choosing whether they wanted to be a reindeer or an elf and were busy talking about what toys they had made. We flew to lots of different destinations, including Southfields and the London Eye on the sleigh. ‘Carrots’ were also counted and shared out between the reindeer to ensure that they had enough energy for their big trip.
One of the practitioners also brought in a camera for the children to have a go with to explore using technology in the forest. Some of the children took to it straight away and looked like little professionals, snapping away and capturing their experiences with their friends from their own perspectives – lovely to see!
TIn the forest, the children watched with fascination as two baby dinosaurs hatched from eggs that had been brought in by Simon and they asked eagerly “Are they real!?”. Busy at ‘Dinosaur Lake’, the children created a pool of water, turned cupcake cases into boats, and raced one another across the lake. Once they had observed the effect of the water sinking into the soil, the children suggested that it looked like concrete and proceeded to make bug-hotel constructions out of it, taking care of their forest-floor friends.
There has been lots of imaginative role-play in the forest this week. One game that was enjoyed especially was ‘The Giant Cooking-Pot Game’. Here there was a big (sometimes friendly, sometimes scary upon request) giant who wanted to cook a pie for their supper. The children chose what vegetables they wanted to be and hopped into the Giant’s pie inside the oven, made from a ring of logs. Some of them escaped from the pie and were chased back into it, and others decided to turn up the temperature of the oven and burn the pie completely so that the Giant had to start all over again! An ice-cream bus was created out of logs and travelled to Northern Ireland, where the children declared their ice-cream flavours, shared them between their friends and counted how many ice-creams they had left.
We swung out of this week on a high as the children were tied in a self-supporting swing under their arms and around their waists, spinning in circles and swooping for the trees. We wish all of you a happy weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth