What a beautiful week we have had in the forest! We have been hugging the shade all week long, and the children have done brilliantly considering how hot and tired the weather has made them. We have continued to enjoy using the top of the site, near our fire circle and once again the children have engaged in the most wonderful and creative role-play.

We have had baddies, superheroes and baby leopards! My favourite moment was when one of our younger children was spotted carrying a huge log around with her for absolute ages; as she carefully put the log down later she told us:

“I’m making my baby to sleep…this is my baby…”

What fantastic imagination!

We have been on some adventure walks to the riverside, which our children have nicknamed ‘the beach’ and have enjoyed splish splash sploshing around here. What a great way to cool down in the Summer heat! On one of the walks we even found a tiny frog, which proved to be very exciting for everyone involved.

Even though it has been tremendously hot the children’s love for fire building is as strong as ever so we have built two fires this week. On Monday we made damper bread to cook over the flames, and yesterday we toasted marshmallows. The children are getting better and better at identifying good sticks for the fire and whittling them to use as toasting sticks. This is always such a good activity to promote teamwork; understanding of safety and mathematical skills; particularly when measuring out ingredients for damper bread, or comparing width and length of sticks.

Farewell to our little ones moving to big boy and girl school.  We wish you all the fun in the world! :-) — Farewell to our little ones moving to big boy and girl school. We wish you all the fun in the world! :-)

Wednesday’s children experienced having the film crew on site as we set about filming a new LFF video. It was so interesting to see such different reactions from all the children- some barely noticed the cameras whilst others hid their faces behind their hands! One little boy was especially interested in what went on behind the camera and asked to see some footage so he got a special preview! We look forward to seeing the finished product…

As you know, we have been avoiding our usual ‘base camp’ for the past two weeks as one of the large trees had a split and needed parts removed to make it safe again. The tree surgeons came in today to complete this task so we all said goodbye to the tree before watching the removal from a safe distance. On the plus side we now have a huge amount of wood to play with! The tree trunk has been chopped up into various sizes and we can’t wait to see what your children will think to do with it. We’re certain that their ideas will be better than ours! More log babies, perhaps? :-)

News

We've said farewell to many of our little ones this week. We will miss you all dearly when you move onto big boy and big girl school and we wish you all the fun in the world! We hope to see you in our holiday camps during your school holidays for more forest fun.

This week we have been trialing our new reporting system. It's been a huge undertaking for us as no system existed whereby information could be recorded whilst away from an internet connection in the forest then securely transmitted via WiFi on return to a hub. So in true LFF style we built a system! Or rather we got a very clever man to build it for us. There have been a couple of glitches along the way which we have hopefully now ironed out as the only way to find out what does and doesn't work is to try the system every day. You can now look forward to every day receiving a report on your child's nappies, sleeps in addition to how well and what they ate. The first system of it's kind that performs the function to create this kind of paperless report without WiFi in the UK!

We are continuing our reflective sessions back at the Scout Hall, this is going really well so far. There were a few days this week that were just too hot for anyone to concentrate so we decided to play out in the shade after dinner for everyone's benefit. The children really seem to love looking back on the photos from the day and it is a valuable experience for all of us to reflect upon their favourite activities. It helps to ensure that we continue to provide opportunities that all of your children are really enjoying (hence the fires in 32 degrees heat!)

It's the end of term today so we will look forward to seeing all of our sessional children returning to us in the first week of September. Next week sees the start of our holiday camps when our full and half day children will be joined by lots of holiday campers for some fun in the forest. First week of holiday camps will be all about pirates! Oo argh!

As a reminder, next week due to the positive response we received from half day parents to our suggestion that we allow the children more play time during their days, all 12.30pm pickups and drop-offs will be from the yellow gate in the forest instead of the car park.

A reminder that our family BBQ event is coming up soon. We are so excited to be seeing you all socially for a catch up on 11th August and will be sending out a RSVP card soon to work out exactly how many sausages we may need ;-) !

Dressing for the weather

It seems we are in for another warm week (dare i say Summer is here!?) so please ensure that you provide your children with a water bottle and sunhat. It is also essential that you apply your child's first layer of sun cream for the day before arrival. We will reapply sun cream and refill water bottles throughout the day, as necessary.

As a guideline next week the children should be wearing: