This week we have continued to be in awe of the beautiful colours appearing in the forest, really feeling that Autumn has now arrived in its full splendour 🍁🍂🍁
We’ve loved using the fallen leaves in our play, reinforcing the rule of “no picking and no licking” to the children to care for our natural world and encourage the forest to grow wild and wonderful. We’ve been busy making autumnal wreaths, using paper plates, stickers, hole punches and threading the stem of the leaves through the holes and sticking them down to produce a gorgeous circular piece of autumnal themed artwork. We’ve also been creating autumnal crowns and pretending to be princes and princesses! We’ve collected the fallen pine cones and wrapped colourful pipe cleaners around them like legs to create spiders and octopus animals. We have also added in conkers to our play. The teachers created a hole through the centre using a palm drill and then the children could thread string or pipe cleaners through it to make necklaces and bracelets. We have also mixed up paints to create autumnal shades of red, brown, orange and gold to produce more unique and beautiful artwork. Our creativity this week using natural materials has been endless!
We’ve been learning more about harvest by looking at Van Gogh paintings of the farmers at work to understand their role and the growth of different crops, vegetables and fruit throughout the year. As an activity, we sprinkled orange lentil seeds into the sand to show the process of planting seeds in the soil, and then used our fingers like rakes over the soil. Colourful diamonds were added to the sand to represent the growing fruits and we used our fine motor skills to pinch the tweezers and pick the fruit.
On our adventure walks we’ve loved searching for mushrooms hiding in the bushes and collecting sticks along the way to bring back to our site and use to build dens, which we’ve used as a cosy hideaway for reading stories or as a secret spot when playing hide and seek!
Another highlight of the week was making kites to fly in the breeze by using long sticks and attaching recycled bags to the end with tape which flew so well in the breeze. The bunnies and foxes raced around on the meadow all together!
In terms of mark making, we’ve been practicing drawing our shapes by tracing over circles, squares, rectangles and hearts, and also practicing our maths by counting the number of corners on the shapes.
The mud kitchen has been loads of fun, as ever, with some extra muddy puddles to play with. We’ve pretended to be working in a restaurant kitchen, transferring the water into different containers, putting the pans into the oven and producing all sorts of delicious meals such as pancakes, chicken pie and brownies!
We have definitely felt a shift in the weather this week, so the winter gloves and hats have kept us feeling cosy, and we’ve been running, jumping, climbing and dancing to keep our bodies warm too. Our Friday hot chocolate also kept us feeling happy and warm from the inside out. Little Forest Folke-rs definitely know how to make the most of the day and embrace every kind of weather. Bring on next week!
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon