Our Week in the Forest
This week at Little Forest Folk Winkworth we’ve been continuing our planting and gardening theme.
Our Little Forest Folk-ers have helped us do some weeding and tidying up of our cottage garden and done lots of planting. This encourages environmental awareness and stewardship and helps them develop a meaningful connection to the natural world and take pride in the environment and little community we have here at Little Forest Folk Winkworth. This was extended through a nature walk around the Arboretum picking up fallen blossoms and leaves for use later in the week.
Our little gardeners also carefully used trowels to scoop compost into plant pots, made a little indent with their fingers in the soil and planted sunflower seeds. We can’t wait to see how tall they grow! All this planting is great learning in disguise. As well as fine motor skill development, it supports their communication and language because all the while they are planting, they learn relevant vocabulary such as seed, soil, stem, roots, growth and environment. It provoked numerous discussions with the children asking all sorts of questions, making their own predictions and explaining what they know about plants and gardening from their own experiences.
We also took time to observe the cress seeds we planted last week. This led to great observations and excitement comparing which of the seeds grew better, the ones in compost or on paper towels, the ones in the light or the shade.
We’ve incorporated the theme into our mud kitchen setup. On one day it was transformed into a garden centre shop, for the children to sell and weigh various fruits and vegetables and on another day it became a science laboratory to explore the properties of plants and to mix coloured water and play with Oobleck (a mix of cornflour and water that acts as both a solid and a liquid, known as a non-Newtonian fluid), whilst they were at it! Another day we used leaves and twigs for a counting activity, with the children tasked with grouping the items into numbered shapes.
Elsewhere, the children loved painting pictures of daffodils and printing with leaves covered in paint, admiring the different patterns formed by the leaf structures and how it looked when they moved the painted leaves around on their paper. Of course this inevitably turned into finger, then hand painting, so we ended up with a fair few ‘green fingered’ children that day!
Some of our little ones even pretended to be plants themselves one day. Using the tyres as their plant pots, they took it in turns to water, feed and provide sunlight for each other to grow into beautiful, tall, strong trees!
Little Forest Folk
Winkworth