With Easter weekend behind us our children came bounding back into the forest with stories of their amazing, fun filled weekends. The Easter theme carried on in the forest with Easter stories and games still being played, as well as tales from all of the egg hunts that happened. The temperature may have dropped, but the levels of fun and excitement stayed as high as always.
Yet again, our adventure walks have been a huge highlight of our week. All of our children have enjoyed going to different parts of the forest this week, finding new places to climb and explore. The beech forest is such a beautiful and enchanting place to visit. The tall trees make our children look up in awe, and the few that have fallen make the perfect space to show how amazingly well our Forest Folk-ers can climb. There are small areas for children to climb into, as well as the den which is always exciting to go into. The children pretend it’s a police station or a place to hide from forest monsters, or even a little house for fairies. It’s a den full of endless opportunity.
Another big hit at the beech forest is the GIGANTIC hill that we climb up. Once the children make it to the top, they have the choice of which way they would like to go down. We roll, run and slide to the bottom, and all you can hear is children’s laughter as they are doing it. It doesn’t matter how many times we go up and down, it is always as exciting as the first time!
Along with exciting adventure walks, we have also had so many activities on site. Some of our children spent some time making a fairy garden. It was a great opportunity for our children to test their scissor using skills, by drawing the fairies and then cutting them out when they were finished. Using scissors with our children is always a skill they love to learn as it shows their independence because they have to use them on their own. With an adult by their side, watching carefully, the children focus on the things they want to cut and glide the scissors through their paper. Then the end result is such a thing to be proud of and we love sharing everyone’s results.
Drawing has been one our much-loved activities during this week. Not only have the children been creating wonderfully pieces of unique artwork, but also props for their games. We have had treasure maps drawn by our children which have been used to hunt for ‘X marks the spot’ around the forest. There have been tracks drawn and X’s marked on the paper where the children thought treasure was hidden. We all then worked together to explore the meadow and even found some X’s! The children then began to dig a little to see what they could find. We found incredible stones and had a look at the different patterns that they had on them, comparing them to each other’s. After going on our own treasure hunt, we read a story about pirates on a treasure hunt. The children compared their own treasure hunt to the one that we had read and wanted to see if they could add different parts to theirs next time.
It’s been a very busy few days in the forest, but we have loved all of the fun activities and chances to explore.
The forest is full of opportunities to explore, imagine and create and it’s a joy to witness it every day.
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon