Our Week in the Forest
What a gorgeous week we have had with our Little Forest Folk-ers! We have new intentions for our 3-4 year olds and they have risen to those challenges, along with some of our 2-3 year olds joining in! The educators have used words such as: hob, papaya, wheat, field, oven gloves, grill, kiwi, heat, safety, stable and many more, to broaden our children’s vocabulary around the new topic of ‘farm to plate’ and to support them in understanding the need for safety in the kitchen.
Our explorers have considered what could be used as bedding in a stable for a horse, created stables of their own using recycled junk modelling materials, coloured in a chicken using egg shaped chalks and helped to remove bugs from ‘Poor Sammy’s’ tummy after he ‘picked and licked’! All great activities for farm discussions and hygiene around food.
Our educators provided our wonderful children with a cardboard oven in the mud kitchen this week and discussed safety when using ovens, grills and hobs discussing what can happen if we get too close or don’t have the correct safety items, such as oven gloves, aprons or tea towels. It was wonderful to see the children becoming more adept at putting their ‘oven gloves’ on before using the hob and oven to bake their cakes and biscuits. Our Little Forest Folk-ers took the time to create salt dough and learned about wheat flour by looking in books to see how and where it grows, talking about other things which use wheat as an ingredient such as pasta, biscuits, pancakes and bread. It was amazing to see their learning and language in action when they played with the salt dough in the mud-kitchen oven - of course, putting their gloves on first!
Our Little Forest Folk-ers became chefs one afternoon, using their cutting skills and their growing language skills, to learn about and cut fruits that are not often used on camp to create their own ‘fruit pizzas’. As we cannot have a fire on camp, we traded dough for pittas and/or wraps and after the children had prepared their own fruit, they decided what they would like to use to top their own ‘fruit pizza’. They could choose from apples, cantaloupe melon, golden kiwi, kiwi berries, strawberries, dragon fruit and papaya to put together their culinary masterpieces and finally eat and, hopefully, enjoy them! What a treat!
A lovely week, full of learning, language and laughing! Have a super weekend everyone.
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon Village