Our week in the forest!
Our week has been very creative, slightly spooky, autumnal and sensory based as we have crunched the autumn leaves between our hands and fingers and sprinkled them into witchy potions in the mud kitchen. We enjoyed squishing and rolling sticky, soft play dough and on another day we created spooky grey salt dough and crafted snakes, witches, bats and hats. With recycled cardboard cauldrons and toilet roll tubes, we have created bubbling cauldrons as we dipped the end of our toilet roll tube in paint and dotted the paint above the cauldron to create bubbly patterns.
Our younger forest explorers have relished the soft, fluffy, scented texture of shaving foam as they hunted for small items hidden under the foam and the older children enjoyed adding dots of paint to the foam and learning about colour mixing. A box of expired spaghetti was cooked up and then cooled and lightly oiled to create cool, slippery, worms in the sensory box. Our brave explorers put their hands into a closed box to feel the contents - some of them squealed, while others withdrew their hands but returned to feel again. Another sealed box had the guts of the recently cut open pumpkin which also created a slippery texture with little hard bits in it. Once the contents were revealed, our Little Forest Folk-ers enjoyed incorporating the ingredients into their mud kitchen play and yet more witchy potions.
“Stick Man” by Julia Donaldson has been a popular story this week and has inspired us all to find sticks and join them together carefully with brightly coloured wool to create arms, legs and a slender body. We have had an army of stick men roaming the forest alongside spiders created from paper cups. Our little explorer’s cutting skills were put to the test as they each snipped the rim of the cups, thus creating legs. Some of our spiders had 4 legs, others had as many as 15 legs. Googley eyes were liberally adhered to the cups (as we reminded ourselves that spiders have 8 eyes.)
We have also tested our physical strength this week as the children tied ropes to old tyres, crates and pulled them around the forest. One little chap was asked to sit in a crate and then 4 explorers worked together as a team to pull the rope and transport him in his little sleigh. Our Little Forest Folk-ers created an amazing obstacle course that was both a balancing adventure and a tricky maze. They travelled along, either the surface of the crates and planks or tiptoed between the planks and crates, trying to find their way through the maze. But our hammock, slung up between two trees, was the star of this week's activities - as each child took turns to climb into the hammock to swing and sway gently as birds sang overhead and breezes blew gently through our autumnal foliage.
A wonderful week, we hope you all have a restful weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham