Our Week in the Forest...
A week of walking in another’s paw prints.
Flitting through the meadow, from flower to flower, the children danced in the warming rays. It had taken all their energy to transform from caterpillar to chrysalis to beautiful butterfly. Around them soared eagles and other winged beasts, before they too settled to their nests and their hatching eggs. Our children aren’t children: they are all life, big and small.
Imagine. Yummy nectar all over our forest, in the form of daffodils, has naturally caught the children’s attention. Despite some early efforts to behead the bright flowers, the children grew to appreciate the blossoming blooms for their work in helping bees to make honey, insects to feed, and other people to enjoy in contrast to the still wintry forest. This triggered a desire for the children to imagine themselves as the different insects, with some choosing butterflies and using some excellent vocabulary such as ‘chrysalis’. The wings in the dress-up box helped make the illusion complete. This wasn’t the end of the children’s animal imaginings, however, as several children became very protective parents as either eagles or pterodactyls and were all perched up trees to keep their eggs warm until the time when they hatched.
Build. The amount of construction materials around the forest are numerous and incredibly varied. This week saw a real push towards tent and den making that the children took to with pleasure and showed that there’s no need for Lego when you have a forest around you! Pallets, sticks, mud, cloth, hay and rope were all brought to bear and the end shelters were wondrous to behold and became large focal points for all the different play and activity you could think of. Climbing the outside of the structures tested the children’s physical abilities while inside, the stories and scenarios took everyone to a different place – almost physically in one case as the tent became an aeroplane that got stuck in a storm! Thankfully the pilots got them out of trouble.
Explore. With the increased temperatures and better weather, the children have been eager to stretch their legs outside of the fenced boundary and go on the famous adventure walks. The reasons for the walks have been quite different this week: bear hunts turned up tracks and lots of new growth along the paths including holly which the children were especially interested in; and dinosaur hunts that uncovered a large dinosaur skeleton stuck in lava, and the children then had to safely get across, finding a castle (an old, hollow tree) on an island at the end of the lava which became surrounded by wolves!
I wonder what adventures will be had next week?!
Food in the forest:
Our new Spring menu will be starting next week!
The full menu can be found on our website HERE
This is one of our new yummy lunch dishes;
Slow cooked haricot beans in homemade tomato sauce with cheddar cheese, served with bread rolls.
The sauce is given acidity with cider vinegar and a little depth and sweetness with dark muscovado sugar.
Enjoy that warm Spring sunshine!
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon
