Our week in the forest

We have all had the most beautiful week in the forest with such a mix of weather! For most children Friday’s rainy day play seems to have been the highlight!

The start of the week was lovely and sunny, we went on adventure walks to the beach and tried to keep cool in the shade as much as possible. The children were very interested in building castle and houses with the willow logs, this kept them busy for ages and they then enjoyed ‘nesting’ and making the interior really cosy with lots of soft leaves and grass.

We have had a few more children settling in this week, and a couple that have now officially started. They are all adjusting to life in the forest so well and are beginning to form lots of lovely relationships already, which is really heart-warming to see.

Our library and creation station have been really popular this week, it’s great to see the children using the newer forest areas with such confidence. We are continually learning from them in terms of which resources to provide and we seem to have hit the nail on the head with these two areas!

Today we loved all the splishy splashy puddle, rain and mud fun! We set up tarps in base camp and waited for the rain to fill up pockets before bumping them up and creating ‘waterfalls’. This was an extremely popular activity, which saw many children squirming in anticipation and thoroughly enjoying watching the effect of their actions. Some children were really keen to see if there had been enough rain to see the return of the little stream that leads into our swampy areas. Unfortunately it had not rained enough, but one child reassured us all that

“One day it will rain lots and lots, so much that we will need a boat for the swamp!”

This then led to the children role-playing that they were already in boats as they sat huddled together and kept an eye out for sharks!

News

Over the next couple of weeks we will be sending one member of staff per day over to the Chiswick site. As we are not yet at capacity due to new children settling in slowly we wanted to make the most of being overstaffed. We believe that this exchange will be an excellent way to build stronger links between the two nurseries, to share ideas and improve our practice. This should not have a negative effect on the children as most of them have lovely bonds with many different practitioners!

Last week I was a little hasty in my excitement about the waterproofs arriving and forgot that we needed time to label and sort them all before handing them out to you! We are all ready now so you will definitely get a pair next week. We have new colours; yellow is the smaller size and red the larger one. Some of the older children that have been here a while might associate red with being for ‘small children’ so please reassure them this is no longer the case! Can we please ask that you label both the jacket and trousers? The children love to take off their jackets and we want to ensure that they all return to their rightful owners at the end of the day!

We had a bit of an issue with the Nursery Genie system that we use to share information of your child's day so apologies for any errors on this. We think the problem is sorted now. Just to remind you, the information we include is a summary of the day, what food the children were offered and how much they ate, sleep times and nappy changes. We do not include information about toileting, but we do understand that when children are potty training you like to know about how they are getting on. We will aim to provide this information to you when handing over at the end of each session.

Dressing for the weather

We're due to have more moderate temperatures next week, but we would still recommend putting sunscreen on your child before they arrive.

As a guideline next week the children should be wearing:

One pair of comfortable trousers (jogging bottoms or leggings)
One t-shirt
One fleecy zip up jacket (in a backpack just in case)
One pair of socks
Wellies or trainers (as long as you don't mind them getting dirty!)

We hope you have a lovely weekend!

Little Forest Folk