Our Week in the Forest...
With Monday being a Bank Holiday and Tuesday an Inset day, it’s been a short week, but a lovely one welcoming back some of our friends who have been on holiday over Easter. The children are so confident with one another and love telling stories of where they have been. Some of the stories are more believable than others, as much as we love the true ones, we love when the children use their creativity and tell us about holidays in faraway lands with dinosaurs, dragons, Paw Patrol characters or journeys where the children flew the planes! It hasn’t taken those who have returned long to get back into the swing of it.
The children are now helping us to organise their day, deciding on whether they want to have an adventure walk in the morning or afternoon. Our morning routine now includes a discussion of how many children we have, what day of the week it is and what the weather is, which we then write up on a blackboard with the help of the children. Little activities like this are a great way of incorporating more written text into our environment in a completely natural way. It also passes more responsibility onto the children, giving them even more self-worth through democratic decision making.
As our average age range climbs, the interest in story scribing correlates. Throughout our short week there has been a very high production rate of children led stories, a lot of themes relating to holidays, beaches and skiing have been the dominating themes. We continue to act out our own stories, through which the confidence and critical thinking of our creations continues to develop. This advanced thinking will help us to further improve the structure of our stories, whilst still retaining the unbridled enthusiasm and charm.
During our Inset day, we created two flowerbeds at our Bowling Club site. One is a raised bed, and the other is lowered into the ground. Over the coming weeks we will start planting with our children, and hopefully will start to reap the benefits later in the summer. As growth continues we will constantly develop our beds to turn into our very own Little Forest Folk Wandsworth allotment.
Have a lovely weekend everybody, see you next week!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth