Our Week in the Forest
This week, we enjoyed an introduction to a new tool work project. We have spoken an incredible amount about the wildlife around us and what we are starting to see, which inspired us to focus on birds in our tool work project. We are going to up-cycle a Christmas tree that one of our team found near the rugby club. Our aim for this project is to make a bird feeder! We spoke about how this will be a long term project and we will do a little bit every week. This week, our first step was to use peelers to whittle the pine needles off the Christmas tree! Now, some of us have whittled before but whittling a Christmas tree brings new challenges as the tree wobbles! We used our non-whittling hand to hold the tree still and learnt how we could move our bodies to make the technique easier for ourselves. We took turns and kept going until we had some bare branches, turns out, even after a couple of months the tree still smells like Christmas! Watch this space for our next steps; sawing the tree into thirds, drilling holes in apples, poking sunflower seeds into the holes and finally, threading the apples onto the branches and hanging the tree pieces up! We are so excited for this project!
This week was Children’s Mental Health Week where we focused some activities on our feelings. With our recently introduced a Kindness Jar which has been a huge success. We spoke about other things we can do to be kind and at each meal time, our educators are able to share and celebrate when we’ve been kind to ourselves or one another. With each celebration, we got to pick a Pom Pom and put it in our kindness jar! Once we fill the kindness jar, we get a surprise! We’ve been discussing what we would like as a team because we’ve worked so hard being kind all together.
Our educators are amazing at creating inspiring role plays and activities for us to help practise using our emotive language, for example; “I love …. About my friends.” “I am happy when I ….”, “My parents are great at ….”, “I’m looking forward to…..” continuing on with these ideas, we created a puppet show where we used the emotion puppets and acted out different scenarios. The puppets follow the zones of regulation emotions with some added extras! We also had ‘surprised’ and ‘frustrated’. We practised our visual expressions to show these as well as understanding when we might be feeling surprised or frustrated.
