Our Week in the Forest
Oh, what a crazy week of weather we have had - but if there’s one thing we are super experienced with here at Little Forest Folk, it’s how to prepare and create an appropriate environment for the extreme weathers! 🌦️ ☀️ ☔️ As usual, our little ones were absolute troupers, and found the unique joy and adventure that the differing weathers bring. We stayed cool by dressing appropriately, wearing sun hats, having regular applications of sun hats, increasing our mandatory water breaks and putting up tarps and sunshades.
On Tuesday we had record-breaking heat, so we took shelter in our indoor area before heading out for an adventure inside the Palace museum and settling for the day in the shaded wooded area under the Bishop’s Tree. Water and ice play was on the rise 🧊, and we stayed cool by crunching up ice and using copious buckets of water in our mud kitchen fun.
Children fashioned their own ice lollies out of clay, forming love heart shapes with either their hands or a cookie cutter. They used a branch as a lolly stick and pretended to lick their yummy creations. In true forest nursery style, it’s always wonderful to see the play potential of a simple stick and other natural treasures! 🪵
Our incredible wooded shaded areas are home to some interesting trees which gives us lots of opportunities to climb. We developed our agility and fundamental movement skills by clinging onto branches and letting our bodies hang, growing important strength in our arms. We put any fears of height to the test when we encouraged our adventurers to navigate their way up through the branches. Many children got impressively high and put a lot of the educators' climbing abilities to shame! 🧗♀️
The Walled Garden is looking beautiful and colourful this time of year, and our Little Forest Folk-ers have been enjoying running through the water sprinklers and giggling in the sunshine. We have taken lots of adventure walks and found lovely shaded areas. We took the paper aeroplanes we created for a flying competition onto the Palace grounds - aeroplanes zoomed through the air at impressive speeds! Our big colourful parachute came with us 🪂 to an open space to work on some basic instruction following. We all grabbed hold of a section of the parachute and swung it “up” and "down”, then ran through it to switch positions with a friend when they heard their name called.
As it’s that time of year, we have many Little Forest Folk-ers attending graduations from other settings and settle-in/meet-the-teacher sessions at their new schools. It’s been wonderful to hear all about these and they have been solid topics at our morning sharing circles. We have some strong speakers, who can tell stories with great articulation and in correct tense, so it’s wonderful to hear these interesting stories around the snack circle. We look forward to our Graduation Picnic next Friday, to say goodbye to all of our special leavers. 🌿
Inspired by the heat, we created beach huts out of crates and colourful bunting. Children could climb over these huts but also take shelter from the sunshine. We drew on the childrens’ experiences from their summer holidays and discussed all the fun things we get up to whilst we’re near the sea 🌊 Mud kitchen play became sandcastle making and water became salty ocean water! 🏖️
Another wonderful week, we hope everyone has a restful weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham