Our Week in the Forest...
Christmas has arrived early at Chiswick! With so much talk about buying and decorating Christmas trees we had to get a move on with our Christmas preparations. On Monday, we took a trip to the library on the hunt for some Christmas stories to share. We enjoyed reading a range of new stories in the library, we can never get enough of them! One of the stories was about writing letters to Santa, so we started talking about what we wanted for Christmas and writing our own letters. While the older children used their phonetic knowledge to write their own letters, some of the younger children drew pictures and had an educator scribe their letter for them.
We also got busy making salt dough to create our own Christmas decorations. Jacki worked with the children to mix their own dough, roll it out and use cookie cutters to cut out their favourite designs. Now we have to let them dry out so we can decorate them next week.
Our afternoons and mornings have been filled with Christmas art and we’ve created our own snowflakes. We folded our square paper into a triangle and made cuts in the sides before opening them up to reveal some impressive patterns. The results of our artistic endeavours have been displayed around the room and are getting us all in the festive mood!
We’ve been enjoying lots of adventure walks this week, spotting a large number of birds on the lake, which is surprising for this time of year. We watched a cormorant dive under the water and emerge, hanging his wings out to dry. The children copied his actions, flapping their wings to shake the water from their feathers. The heron has also been spied regularly on our walks as well as a number of the usual geese, ducks and coots. One of our adventure walks took us to the allotment, where we continue to harvest the amazing produce from this summer. We helped to weed the garden, pull up some of the vegetables and turn the soil in preparation for next spring.
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick