Our Week in the Forest
This week at Little Forest Folk Winkworth we’ve been focussing on supporting the children to build independently, using a wide range of resources to make and enjoy imaginative and complex ‘small worlds’.
This has led to a lot of wonderful play! We’ve enjoyed fairyland when the children decorated small wooden doors and placed them around the garden in places they thought the flies might like to live, all whilst wearing beautiful fairy wings themselves of course!
We took a day to go to the ‘city’, where photos of real skyscrapers provoked conversations about height and materials used to make buildings, before the children went on to create their own architectural wonders! They used a range of resources including wooden blocks and magnet tiles and created magnificent and imaginative shaped buildings for all sorts of purposes - offices where mummies and daddies go to work, buildings for zoos, houses for pirates and cafes for babies, being our personal favourites! In the afternoon some of our adventurers turned a flat piece of card into a 3 dimensional house using a few careful snips and lots of sticky tape, needless to say, they were very proud of their creations and decorated them beautifully. This also gave rise to conversations about 2D and 3D and what other shapes we could make with just one flat piece of card.
The fun continued with ‘bug’ day, which happened to be nice and dry so we took the opportunity to go for a long adventure walk in the Arboretum, collecting lots of nuts, sticks, stones and other forest materials to use in our making session later on. On our return, the children combined their chosen materials together with clay to make the most wonderful mini beasts ever seen! They also enjoyed, and added to a bug hotel, using magnifying glasses to explore the mini beasts hiding in the soil and damp leaves.
Our day on the farm, in contrast, was a little wetter, but that didn’t stop the fun. Our Little Forest Folk-ers’ made their own mini farms, using blocks as fences to enclose the animals on their farm and other blocks to be barns and farm shops. Of course the tractors became very important in their small worlds too, for transporting materials, and keeping up with the neighbour’s farm and wider community!
We also learned how to make flour, using a pestle and mortar to grind oats. The older children in particular were very curious about this process and added lots of their own knowledge about combine harvesters and different types of crops. We explored the different materials and talked about the difference between the whole oats and ground flour using words like soft, smooth, lumpy and fine. We discussed the difference between brown and white bread as they noticed if you shook the oats it separated the whole oats from the ground ones. Once we were happy with our oat flour, we added some water and observed that it became sticky and slimy. Some of the children added more flour and kneaded it into dough. We talked about how we could make it into bread, or in this case oat cakes by adding other ingredients, but in the end everyone was content with squidging, rolling and manipulating the dough with our hands until it was time to clean up for dinner!
Little Forest Folk
Winkworth