Our week in the forest!
What a lovely week we’ve had in the forest as we embraced literature this week. Our favourite books have been “The Moomins and the Great Flood” By Tove Jansson and the “The Jolly Postman” by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. Our arts and crafts have revolved around the Moomins and making fishing rods, drawing the characters and singing the Moomin song. The children have enjoyed building the Moomin homes with recycled boxes and cartons and thus the Moomin valley has grown throughout the week. One of the educators dressed up as Snufkin and interacted amongst the trees and children whilst playing her harmonica.
“The Jolly Postman” story is a classic and the children were thrilled to learn about his postal route as he cycled around delivering mail to a variety of fairytale characters. The wolf in “Red Riding Hood” was sent a cease and desist letter from the lawyers for his identity theft and for stealing Granny's clothing and squatting in her house etc. Goldilocks sent an apology letter to the three bears for eating their food and breaking their furniture, Jack from the beanstalk tale sent a holiday postcard to the giant and so many more as the wonderful story unfolds. The postman cycles from home to home enjoying cups of tea along the way and avoiding the dubious green tea at the witches house where he delivers a witches mail order catalogue. This wonderful story excited and spurred our Little Forest Folk-ers on to writing their own letters and posting them in the small red letter box set up in the forest.
The importance of reading with our children and having so many wonderful books in our large reading bags in the forest and book cases, is how crucial it is for their language development, the growth of their imagination and that books support their emotional intelligence too. Our Little Forest Folk-ers are regularly found looking at books by themselves, asking for stories and then are inspired by the stories and enjoy creating, crafting and taking up pen and paper to create their own wonderful stories too.
Thanks for coming to the forest!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham