Our Week in the Forest...
On Monday we believed that spring had truly sprung! The children requested to swap their jackets for high-visibility vests at a record speed and we were even lucky enough to spot the odd butterfly floating around! The children had a wonderful time in base camp, using the swings, climbing trees, painting or mark-making and for those that were interested we even did some cooking on the fire. Virginia, Sam and our LOVELY new educator, Xiao were all on hand to support the children in collecting pieces of wood for the fire and encouraging them to join in with our fire safety reminders. Once the fire was lit it was time to start cooking - beans on toast! Most of the children were familiar with this dish and could recall and share prior experiences of having ‘beans on toast’. In order to ensure that appetites weren’t spoilt for lunchtime each child was offered a quarter slice of toast with some beans. Sam used this as an opportunity to introduce the language of fractions into the activity as we discussed cutting slices of toast into halves and then quarters. Turns out we ended up serving ‘beans on toast’ canapés!
As you all know, the sunshine didn’t last for long but that certainly didn’t mean the end of our forest fun! We just had extra water as a resource! Alongside some excellent puddle splashing, mud kitchen cooking and general soggy fun we used the opportunity to help the children to build a “water factory”. Using loose parts such as guttering, old bottles and various connecting resources we were able to create brilliant waterways for endless amounts of water-based fun.
The children requested face painting, always a popular choice on a soggy day! In addition to having their own faces painted, which is a great way for them to enrich their role-play games the children had a whale of a time painting their teachers faces too! Spike, Katie and Xiao were treated to fully painted bright red faces (in fact poor Spike had the top of his head painted too! The children see flesh- it will get painted!) No doubt that Little Forest Folk encourage child-led play!
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon