Welcome to Forest-chella 2026!
This week we turned our forest into our very own Coachella Forest 2026! - a wonderful festival packed with live music where imagination and creativity run wild! Dress code? Big smiles, muddy clothes, wellies or forestproof trainers and a rock and roll attitude!
Our adventure began with the all-important festival entry: colourful wristbands and wooden tokens! Our Little Forest Folk-ers queued brilliantly to collect theirs, ready to explore everything on offer. We practised our Maths by trading the correct number of stones and twigs for a wristband and a token. At the end of the day, our little cashiers did numbers and checked how much nature-money we had in our till! Our role-play security team were extremely dedicated – armed with walkie talkies, they checked everyone had their wristband tickets to avoid a very costly fine of 50 stones.
At circle time, we introduced our very own festival map (Coachella-style!), which helped the children locate themselves and choose which activity to visit next. Fancy a refreshing slushy? Find the food and drink stalls before anyone else on the map and get there before there is a queue! It was brilliant to see them finding the map meaningful as they could make decisions, confidently plan their day and independently explore the festival.
At the main stage, we had live music with bands, solo or duet singers who rocked the forest using real microphones and different musical instruments. Some children started off quietly, but soon they were belting out tunes like true pop stars. We heard everything from full-on drum beats to gentle melodies like Brown Bear by our new band The Bear Boys, or lovely songs like Hey Jude from the The Beatles, or shall I say ‘The Beetles’?
Meanwhile, over in the mud kitchen, our ‘food stalls’ were serving up the finest pretend festival treats, including the ever-popular mud smoothie. They mixed fruit toys with mud and water, gave it a whisk with a wiggle, then poured it into a cup and it was ready to go! They also prepared delicious snacks to take away as there was no time to waste when the music was calling!
And because there is no festival without colour and glitter, faces were transformed with colourful paint and tattoos – from slithering snakes and stomping dinosaurs to magical unicorns and faraway planets. Our tie-dye station added a splash of colour to the week too, as children designed their own t-shirts, each one as unique as its creator.
Among the fun, the children were fantastic eco-heroes on Wednesday. We celebrated Earth Day, cleaning up our environment and showing great care for nature. At circle time we discussed our three types of bins: general waste, mixed recycling and compost. Then, we went litter picking around camp using litter pickers and they worked on sorting out rubbish properly by placing everything in the corresponding bin. Then on Thursday, our festival became a land of dragons, knights, and brave adventurers to celebrate St George’s Day. We created shields and swords using cardboard and played wonderfully together in our castle area, complete with a throne fit for royalty. Mix these two wonderful days together, turn it into a book and ta-dah! The Trouble With Dragons was simply the perfect book to read this week!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham