The forest is our canvas!
We had a big mixture of weather this week, with sun, clouds and rain but when the rain did come down on us it made the for most perfect muddy puddles to jump in!
This week there have been some amazing adventure walks in the forest. The children have been excited to go to the frog pond and explore there. They have found baby frogs, dragonflies and bees flying around. The children also use the wooden bridge as a platform to practice their jumping. The landing of the edge of the pond was soft enough for all children to not feel panicked about jumping down, which meant that all the children felt confident to take the leap.
The children have really been helping each other this week. With new children joining, our existing forest folkers have been very keen to help their new friends to explore the forest. We have been talking through our forest rules and explaining them to the newer children and showing them our rule tree cookies to help make them clearer. The children also use these rule tree cookies during their play and use them as props for their imaginative play. It’s interesting to see how the children recreate the situations they have found themselves already in in the forest, and use these situations make play with their friends.
We have also had a lot of mark making activities during our week at Wimbledon. The blackberries have been coming to an end of their ripeness recently, but we didn’t want any to go to waste so they children, with help from Christie, made blackberry paint! The children took the berries and found pots to squash them up in. Then we used sticks and paint brushes to make amazing creations on paper. The colours were so bold and could be changed depending on the juiciness of the berries. It showed the children that you can make paint from the simplest of ingredients and they were excited by the idea that it was them who made the paint from scratch.
Not only did the children mark make with blackberries, but also used the sticks to spell out names of people in the forest. They sat with Jepha and made the shapes of different letters. This helped the children recognise the different shapes of the letters and how to spell names of all the people around them. It was also exciting for them as they were also building things with the things they had around them.
The weather may have been a mixture this week, but it made every day different and exciting!
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon