Our Week in the Forest...
Walking into the forest this week has been magical and as the children stopped at various points to count heads, a Robin flew down from the tree branches onto the brambles and the floor. The little bird skipped around the children’s feet before taking flight back up to the tree. As we carried on with our walk, one child noticed that the Robin looked remarkably like the Robin from the previous tree and declared, “I think it has been following us!”.
Later on, we went on another adventure walk and one of our Little Forest Folk-ers was blowing through a clip on their backpack which made a whistling sound. Suddenly we heard a noise! We all stopped to listen and up above us we heard and saw a young Buzzard sat high up in a tree singing back to us. They took it in turns to sing to one another and the look of joy and wonder on our children’s faces was priceless.
There have been some exciting things happening inside the forest site too – since returning from Christmas we have noticed an increase in how often the children want to sit and dictate stories for educators to write down. So, Abbey decided to create a forest theatre for the children, complete with stage, curtains and audience chairs. The children sat down together and created characters and some stories which led to a very unusual plot twist – Ana, from Frozen, was sadly pronounced dead but then to everyone’s surprise ended up being very much alive when she walked dramatically out of the bushes!
The children don’t feel their stories are ready for theatre production yet and want to keep working on them, however, we have had some great spontaneous concerts. One child introduced us to a pirate song from Paw Patrol and another child took stage and sang ‘A Million Dreams’ from the musical ‘The Greatest Showman’. Our Little Forest Folk-ers are developing their confidence during these performances as well as learning to cheer on their friends.
We have also been fascinated with the sand timers that arrived in the forest last week and now language and concepts around time have been appearing in the younger children’s play. We also had a clock face in the forest and a lot of the children enjoyed counting the hours as they moved the hands and discussing which times matched which parts of their routines. This interest in time has also helped our Little Forest Folk-ers with their sharing, with some children beginning to use the sand timers to measure out how long a turn will take.
We hope your week has been as good as ours and have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon