Our Week in the Forest
This week at Little Forest Folk Winkworth we have embraced the Christmas spirit and got stuck into a number of imaginative and crafty activities to explore different object’s sizes, weights, lengths and capacity, as well as build things with a range of appropriate resources.
Santa’s sleigh, constructed out of crates, logs and planks of wood, with bright yellow ropes for reins and reindeer antler from fallen branches, has been a huge hit with the children. They have loved jingling the bells, imagining a herd of reindeer pulling them into the sky, shouting directions to the North Pole and Mars, then loading and unloading the sleigh with presents and delivering them to us all. The sleigh has also been decorated with chalk, then cleaned and decorated again multiple times - gifts have been wrapped and unwrapped repeatedly - providing hours of fun, with copious amounts of learning in disguise as we prompted discussions of which boxes were bigger, smaller, longer and heavier.
We are always impressed by the way our Little Forest Folk-ers take what we have provided and make it their own. Whilst we built towers of tyres to represent chimneys for presents to be sent down, after a while, the towers became the barrel for real life games of ‘pop up pirate’ (don’t worry, no swords were used in this role play!). Similarly, when we started face painting our little explorers as reindeer, several of them branched out to be the grinch, stealing presents and playing at spoiling everyone’s Christmas - having a vast amount of fun whilst doing so of course.
The children have enjoyed a lot of crafting and painting this week, from using dot markers to make wrapping paper to dipping cardboard shapes in paint to make printed Christmas tree cards and (our favourite) making gorgeous little robin tree decorations out of wood cookies, red paint, googly eyes and leaves for wings. It was then an absolute treat for a little robin to hop up to our morning circle one day to say hello - perhaps they were visiting thanks to all the worms our children found during all the digging and gardening they did this week?!
Of course, it wouldn’t be a festive week without enjoying the story of Stick Man’s adventures and we have built lots of different obstacle courses together to represent his journey, as well as the Grinch’s cave, Santa’s grotto and the Elves’ workshops. That is the magical thing about our imaginations, we really can go anywhere and objects can become whatever we want, whilst staying safely in our back garden!
Little Forest Folk
Winkworth