It’s been a wonderfully physical week in the forest this week! For our intrepid explorers, we installed a variety of additional climbing, scrambling, jumping, balancing, pulling and pushing activities into our camp to really focus on the healthy choices for activities. Over the week, our setups have challenged our team to really consider and hone their gross motor skills, they have included: a diagonal and vertical climbing net (to go alongside our horizontal one), a wobbling bridge (built by the children last week), a longer slackline for the children to balance, bounce and swing on, the beginning of a den for the children to adapt - many were collecting branches to create their very own ‘scaffolding’ around this! - and of course our climbing tree has been getting plenty of use! Phew!
We also collected lots of older blackberries and put those to good use in a number of ways - we discussed how healthy fruits and vegetables are and thought about what could be made with berries as an ingredient - lots of pies, muffins and healthy biscuits like the ones we get from Two Teaspoons were created in our mud kitchen. While talking about Two Teaspoons, we also dropped in our new harvest of potatoes that we dug up last Friday, for them to create a lovely, healthy meal from - something that we tried for dinner on Thursday!
Using leftover berries, our creative group decided to create some paint, so they added water and used potato mashers to make a wonderful purple paint of our own. Once the paint was ready, we put it to one side and considered what we could use on the forest floor around us to build our own paint brushes. Once those were made, lots of amazing abstract arts were developed - all looking and smelling beautiful!
In addition to all of that, the children were given an old bicycle tyre, and decided how we might reuse it, tying in with our Eco work and ideas. First, they decided to use it with some paint and explore the marks that it made on a long piece of paper - this had lots of different elements to it, first painting - but actually moving an old tyre is tricky… they had to problem solve and move and discover a good way of doing this, all in one go! They were up to the challenge though and created some lovely trails and tracks while still working on the physical fine and gross motor skills. All this, as well as creating dream catchers, doing some Japanese hapa zome, cutting leaves, making bracelets, going for walks and kite building!
Have a restful weekend everyone, we know we will!
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon Village