Our Week in the Forest...
Holiday campers have continued to fill our forests this week and it has been lovely to see how quickly some of these new faces have settled into our forest routines.
This week we have enjoyed some den building, working together to transport some larger logs through the forest in order to build first a couch and then a house. Some of the children focused on painting the fallen logs with chalk or mud, while others concentrated on building an entrance with sticks. We finished our creation by rigging a tarp for the roof and the space quickly turned into a restaurant where we began to cook some tasty treats for our friends.
After learning how to cut our own tree cookies last week, our tool work this week turned to using the palm drill. We used these to drill holes into the tree cookies in order to make our own watches or medals. While some of the children focused on their literacy skills, sounding out and writing words like “super star” on their medals, others focused on their mathematical skills, writing the numbers in order around the clock face and deciding what time they wanted it to be.
We visited the allotment a few times this week, first to water our plants that have been growing and then to plant some potatoes. Our trips to the allotment have been a great opportunity for us to learn some important gardening skills, share our knowledge of different vegetables and flowers, and to begin to understand and talk about how plants grow and change. It is lovely to see how keen most of our children are to visit the garden and enjoy some gardening. We also made our own mini garden in the forest, using leaves and sticks, and planting them within an enclosure of logs. It looked like a miniature forest and it was lovely to see the care the children took in choosing and placing their sticks inside the space.
A real excitement this week was finding a shopping basket in the bushes. The basket quickly became the preferred method of transporting logs around the forest and we were all keen to have a turn. It is always lovely to see how an everyday object can be so much more exciting when it is discovered in the forest with friends.
We were also excited to celebrate Chiswick’s third birthday this week and as Nafisa returned to Chiswick, she recalled how she had been there when Chiswick had first opened. We were also able to celebrate with some of our older Chiswick friends who had returned for the holiday camps this year. Happy Birthday Chiswick!
We hope you all have a wonderful long weekend and will see our Little Forest Folk-ers back in the forest on Wednesday 24th April!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick