Our Week in the Forest
This week, we’ve enjoyed getting into the festive spirit! We explored Christmas and Hanukkah by making baubles for our pallet Christmas tree and spinning tops as a dreidel to play for Hanukkah. We have practised our tool work safety using the saw and palm drill. For both activities we used the same tools and techniques, it’s was great to have opportunities to practise, strengthen and progress our skills. For the baubles, we sawed a wood cookie and then drilled a hole. After, we painted and decorated them using sparkly paint before threading string through to make an attachment. For the dreidel spinning tops, we sawed a wood cookie and then drilled a hole similar to the baubles but our next challenge was to find a stick to poke through to act as the axis for our creation to spin on! The projects were completed in the morning and it brought everyone joy to play with all day in the forest and even back at the scout hut!
Continuing with the festive spirit, we also enjoyed many Santa’s sleigh role plays. The educators moved and designed a pallet structure along with ropes for everyone to explore and ignite their imagination. Our Little Forest Folk-ers quickly became reindeers, elves and Santas and also practised their singing by changing the words to fit our names as the characters!
As some of you may have attended the parent workshop earlier in the week, we would like to explain some of the key books we’ve been reading and discussing in recent weeks. 'The Gruffalo', 'First Facts - Dinosaurs', 'Find Out About Our Feelings' and 'The Family Tree'. One of our educators also introduced Dinosaur of the Day and we’ve explored the different features and characteristics that each dinosaur has each day. Using pictures and descriptions to help us understand the differences between the dinosaurs compared to our well known and loved T- Rexes. At Little Forest Folk Wimbledon, we have an inspiring walk in and our landmarks of the walk have been named from spots of the Gruffalo! We added description and acted out the story line; we then add our own storyline and plot each time we go past it. Finally, our last two books are about feelings and families, celebrating our self- regulation skills and showing them to our younger friends who join us during the academic year. We are able to name and label our feels using zones of regulations and check in using our spoons decorated by us!
A great week, we look forward to more adventures next week!
