Our Week in the Forest
This week has been an important one, full of all kinds of emotions as we waved off some of our leavers onto their summer of fun before their new adventure at big school. We celebrated children’s final forest days in our usual forest ways, dancing, investigating and exploring. We have had a lovely afternoon today hosting our graduation ceremony where our little ones had an opportunity to celebrate their achievements. Our leavers have developed into strong, emotionally resilient, curious and imaginative adventurers with a love of learning - we will miss each and every one of you. As we wave them off, we reflect that this part of the job never gets easier, but us educators have complete faith and trust that each child is ready for the adventure ahead of them. Please take a bit of the forest with you, and continue to explore, play and get completely covered in mud! 🪵
We celebrated our love for nature by creating a Little Forest Folk banner using natural resources. We used the shortened phrase ‘LFF’ and explored early phonics letters and sounds by repeating and identifying the phonemes. We created the letters using sticky back tape and then searched the palace grounds for some interesting natural treasures. We collected pine cones, small stones, interesting leaves and twigs. We then stuck our finds onto the sticky tape, forming the letters using natural materials. 🍂
We had many princesses and butterflies on camp this week 🦋 As part of our continuous provision we have plenty of sensory rich materials, colourful and inviting resources like mesh fabrics. We love watching our adventurers engage with open-ended play, where they put their imaginations to the test and fashion new concepts, using creative thinking to form new play ideas. This week we saw these fabrics used in wonderful ways. We tied vibrant colours to our wrists and danced around camp, flapping our arms up and down mirroring the moves of beautiful butterflies. One child fashioned their very own princess skirt, a future designer in the making! 👗
This week we went mark-making mad! 🖍️ Art & Design Expression was a core part of our fortnightly planning, so we made sure we had plenty of opportunities for drawing, painting and making a big old mess with paint and art resources! We worked on our early writing skills with some intricate designs. We coloured in a beautiful mermaid in an activity led by Maria. 🧜♀️ We engaged our younger children with a messy play-style art activity. Children used interesting hand movements to push blue paint around the paper, making beautiful waves within the ocean 🌊
We had another scorcher on Thursday! We have begun to adapt to the heat very well this year and to welcome its unpredictability! Our Little Forest Folk-ers had plenty of suncream, sun hats on whilst in the sun and plenty of time shaded under our many tarps. We went on a hunt for some shade and found ourselves tucked in a wooded area, fit for Wild Things and Gruffalos. Maria opened her bag with a surprise, water sprays! Let the water fight begin! 💦 Children took turns with the water sprays whilst the rest giggled and ran from the sprays, we stayed super cool and it was a barrel full of laughs.
Little Forest Folk
Fulham