What another busy week we have had in the forest this week! From having another set of special visitors come and see us to celebrating Hanukkah to being reacquainted with Ruby the Elf.
The winds, rains and storm of the weekend had left its mark in the forest and the children all delighted in finding new broken twigs, leaves and small branches that had littered our forest floor from our beautiful plane tree. This enabled our Little Forest Folk-ers to use their imagination to create walking sticks, stirring spoons, magic wands and even hobby horses! Even our tarpaulins didn’t escape the high winds and had sadly ripped in half, so with help from the children we untwisted tricky knots and we took down the ripped tarpaulins before unfolding and inspecting the replacement tarpaulin. As we hoisted the ropes high up onto the shipping containers, the children advised the educators with caution to keep safe and even suggested where the knots should be tied.
Earlier on in the week, one of our parents kindly arranged for the mounted police to come and visit us!! The children and educators were very, very, excited when they arrived!! The beautiful, very tall, white horse was called Kew and his gorgeous, equally tall, brown companion horse was called Quotro and they were both thirteen years old. The police officers, Helen and John, were lovely and they answered all the questions the children had. One by one the brave children approached the very tall, gentle, well-behaved horses and stroked their warm, silky coats. Miranda was even lucky to feed them their favourite food – apples and carrots with the horses neighing thanks for the treat!
This week we have also been celebrating Hanukkah, and what it means to the Jewish community. We talked about the importance of lighting a very special candle called the menorah which is lit for the eight days of Hanukkah. This then inspired the children to make their own menorahs from clay and carefully push long slim candles into their creations. One of our children even brought in a special dreidel to show us from home and they taught us the chorus to ‘The Dreidel’ song which the children enjoyed learning and singing. We even played our own dreidel game in the forest and once the rules had been explained, the children had great fun spinning the dreidel to see which Jewish symbol it landed on!
On December the first, a very special parcel arrived from the North Pole, and it was addressed to the children of Little Forest Folk, Twickenham. We carefully opened the box, and we were delighted to be reacquainted with Ruby the Elf. Ruby came to the forest last year too and hid around the forest everyday between December the first and Christmas, with the children having the task of trying to find her hiding spot each morning! From her hiding place, Ruby watches all the children and educators before flying back to Santa every evening to let him know how we are all behaving. Sometimes Ruby hides well in the forest, but other times it us takes ages to find her. We look forward to where she ends up every morning when we arrive in the forest in the coming weeks.
Our eco-council have been busy this week by sorting through our plastic and glass containers before using our trolley to cart the recycling to our nearby recycling bins. When the children got there, they carefully posted the items into the holes and listened excitedly as they fell to the bottom of the container. This activity always opens up opportunities for the children to discuss how to look after the forest and take care of our environment. To help keep us warm throughout the week we have been reading and telling lots of stories, joining in with lots of action songs, team games and even parachute games to keep us moving and were even treated to a glorious, roaring fire where we had our afternoon snack while watching the sun setting.
Have a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham