Our Week in the Forest...
This week storm Gareth has done his best to stop our fun, but he hasn’t quite managed!
On Monday, we had a blustery day at Paradise but still managed to get outside for a play and to cook some fruit on the fire. Tuesday and Wednesday were our ‘different days’. At Little Forest Folk, we do our best to be outside in all weather conditions but sometimes it’s just not safe and on Tuesday and Wednesday we deemed the wind too strong to be in the forest. On these days, the children took part in lots of different activities that aren’t always possible out in the forest. Lots of these included combining ingredients to make lots of different mixtures - we made play dough, we made moon-sand and we made magic slime. All these activities required the children to measure, count and most importantly get messy meaning all were instant hits.
We also did lots of painting and lots of playing with ‘small world’ toys such as train tracks and farm animals. In the forest, the children are so creative, and often their role play stimulates from having very few resources, thus they need to come up with their own ideas. Although throughout these days we still frequently donned our waterproofs in order to play in the field at the bowling club, the children still very much enjoyed the novelty of the different toys they could play with inside.
On Thursday, we were back to our natural habitat where the children could build dens, dig for treasure and of course, turn sticks into anything and everything. The wind was still quite strong, and it rained throughout the day, but these weather elements provide opportunities for some really fun activities, and so long as you don’t ever feel wet or cold, they can be some of the most fun conditions to be outside in. The children enjoyed watching the tarps blow in the wind, but also enjoyed watching how the water collected on top before running off and dripping into the bucket. This was then turned into whatever mixture their imaginations lead to.
It’s been a week where we’ve had to take each day as it comes, and the children haven’t been phased by this at all. They are so resilient that they have seamlessly transferred between days inside and outside and have seemed to enjoy every minute of it!
Hopefully the winds die down a little for next week, but regardless, we know it’s going to be another fun week!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth