Our Week in the Forest...
We have had a wonderful splashy time at Little Forest Folk Fulham this week! The rain has created some amazing puddles and the children have spent hours running and jumping in the water, spooning it from the puddles to make potions in the mud kitchen and using the rain to conduct science experiments with ink. We discovered this week that if you use ink and dye to decorate your piece of paper and then hang it in the rain, the ink makes great stripy patterns and by the morning some colours have completely vanished!
The children have incorporated the weather in their play as well this week building a magnificent storm shelter from loose parts to protect themselves from the elements. Much discussion was had about what the best materials were to use to make the shelter safe from lightning. One of the children explained to her friends that rubber protects you from lightning. On hearing this, the children searched the forest high and low for things that might be made of rubber. They were keen to share what they had found and work out if it would be good for the storm shelter and where they should put it. They debated the pros and cons of the wood, cable reels, buckets and string, sharing their knowledge and ideas with each other.
As more rain fell, the mud kitchen became muddier and muddier. The children used the mud to create mud balls and sculptures, using leaves, sticks and stones to decorate them. One of the children used the mud to make ‘Olaf’ the snowman whilst another made a volcano. It was wonderful to hear so much descriptive language being spontaneously used by the children in the forest to describe what the mud looked and felt like. One of the children decided to use the wet mud as cement to join their sticks and stones together. This led to an interesting discussion about what is the best material to build a house out of and why the little pigs house of straw got blown down by the big bad wolf. Two of our younger children then role played the three little pigs, building houses from straw and sticks and having them blown down by a wolf!
We hope you too have had a lovely week and we cannot wait to see what adventures we will be having next week!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham