Our Week in the Forest...
This week we have been enjoying the glorious sunshine on lots of adventures walks around the forest. The presence of the sun means shadows and this has meant exploring the shapes our bodies could make and how we could make our shadows move. We also enjoyed some games of hide and seek in the long grass.
We had a no resource day this week which encouraged the children to focus their play away from the mud kitchen and physical challenges. It was lovely to see the creativity that the children came up with, using sticks to map out floor plans of houses on the ground and decorating them with leaves, talking about each room and what it is used for. We also used our muscles to lift and carry large logs and transport them around the forest.
We have enjoyed hunting for leopard slugs this week and have closely observed their movements, particularly in the way they hang from sticks and climb down branches. We were amazed by their stickiness and how they could hang upside down from a log without falling off. On another day, we found lots of bubbles sticking to some leaves which we thought looked a little like saliva. After conducting some research on trusty google we discovered that this insect was a meadow froghopper also known as a meadow spittlebug.
We have been back to visit the allotment quite a few times and weeds are quickly growing around our lovely veggies so we have spent lots of time watering and weeding. We have talked about pulling up the weeds and the children asked why. We explained that the weeds grow very quickly and will take all the nutrients and water from the soil stopping the vegetables from growing big and strong. The children then looked really closely at the shape and features of the weeds and were able to pull out the weeds, leaving the vegetables growing.
Our counting by twos is improving greatly and this week we even talked about counting how many fingers were on the caterpillar. We know that each child has ten and that we could count by tens to find the total. We had 80 fingers!
We hope you all have a wonderful long weekend and look forward to what our holiday camp brings next week!
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick