Our Week in the Forest
Welcome to Little Forest Folk Twickenham where we have had a week of scientific investigation! We have been learning about the human body and what is inside our bodies. The human heart has been a strong topic of conversation for us as we can feel our hearts beat when we run around and we can see our skin turn pink when we get hot. If we cut or scrape ourselves we see the blood leak out, all these observations have captivated our little investigators. With Valentine’s day looming we have also made a variety of heart shaped crafts and talked about love and being kind and gentle in the forest as well as at home.
We created some small volcanoes in the forest one day with small bottles, vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. Once they were all combined the children were thrilled to observe the chemical reaction. We talked about Lava being molten rock and how dangerous and powerful the explosion can be.
We spent hours at the water bowls and water tanks exploring the concepts of floating and sinking. We were all curious to find out which items would sink eg. stones, and which would float eg. the sticks. We floated plastic plates, leaves, pom poms, glue spreaders, and paper for a while. The items that sank were heavy, such as toy cars, paint brushes, a ball of mud, and yet a large chunk of bark floated! Lots of questions and lots of curiosity during this experiment.
We had great fun adding oil to water and shaking it up and seeing it separate out and the oil float on the water, we then added paint to the mix and saw the water change colour but the oils still floating on the surface after it had been shaken so vigorously.
In our mud kitchen we enjoyed pouring and measuring volume from small jugs to big jugs, from pots to pans. We also learnt how to use pipettes and gather small drops of water and transfer it to other containers. Again paint entered the mix as we experimented with colour, turning yellow water orange by adding a few drops of red etc. By the end of the day our coloured water samples in the mud kitchen were all brown having been all incorporated into each other and of course a little mud added for texture and viscosity.
Our magnets were the most magical science of all as we patrolled the forest touching our magnetic wands to various items and finding wood and sticks are not magnetic but the tuff tray legs are made of metal and are magnetic. The sticks and leaves are not, but a few of our stones were, this led onto a talk about iron, and rocks from ancient volcanoes.
Thanks for coming to the forest!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham