Our Week in the Forest
This week at Little Forest Folk Winkworth we’ve enjoyed heading out to our forest site in the Arboretum for full day sessions. The bluebells are starting to show, the trees are filled with pink and white blossoms, there are woodpeckers everywhere and it really feels like Spring is here! The children have had lots of opportunities to develop their fine and gross motor skills with activities out in the forest and back at the cottage too.
There has been a lot of Easter themed crafting! Wooden egg decorations have been beautifully coloured in, the children drew and cut out egg shapes from cardboard, practicing their fantastic scissors skills and eggs have been painted using mud, to great effect. An old egg carton tray was transformed into a brilliant fine motor skills activity, with carrots made from pipe cleaners that the children had to remove using tweezers, counting as they extracted each one and then finding out it was just as tricky to put the carrots back in!
The best craft of all was making little rabbits out of wood. The children took it in turns to use the bow saw and were amazing at listening to and following all the safety instructions. They each sawed two segments of log, one large for the body and one small, for the head. Concentrating really hard, they then used a hand drill to make holes in each of the bits of wood and inserted a stick to connect the two pieces together. Our Little Forest Folk-ers then glued a cotton wool ball on for the tail, added floppy tissue paper ears and completed the rabbits by adding bunny features on the face. The children were all super proud of their creations!
To balance all this fine motor activity, we headed out on a long adventure walk down to the boathouse and over to the other side of the Arboretum. The youngest children in particular did really well with the long climb back up the hill. We’ve also done lots of tree climbing and making our own ball runs and obstacle courses using tyres, fallen wood, tree stumps, logs, wooden planks and old drain pipes. These obstacle courses evolved into mini-beast hunting as the kids loved upending all the tree stumps to see what has been hiding underneath. They found lots of worms, centipedes, millipedes, earwigs, woodlice and beetles.
After all that excitement we cooked our dinner on the fire one afternoon, an opportunity to practice our listening skills to stay safe around the fire and to share all sorts of wonderful stories and songs as each child waited for their turn to stir the pot.
All in all, it was a wonderful week and we wish all our children, families and super staff team a lovely long weekend.
We look forward to seeing you back in the forest for more fun next week!
Little Forest Folk
Winkworth