Our Week in the Forest
This week at Little Forest Folk Winkworth we’ve been doing all sorts of bird related activities to celebrate this year’s RSPB Great Garden Birdwatch, which has also helped us to learn and practice lots of maths!
The children really enjoyed playing with coloured feathers, exploring their texture and prompting vocabulary like ‘feathery’, ‘soft’, ‘floaty’ and of course, ‘tickly’! They then used their developing fine motor and maths skills to see and count how many pegs they could fit on each feather. Some feathers could fit 5 pegs on them so they must have come from quite large birds! Our little explorers also loved using the feathers as fantastic natural paintbrushes, resulting in wonderful patterns and textures.
On another day the children made bird feeders by softening some lard in their hands and rolling it into a ball together with plenty of seeds and a ribbon to hang up in a tree. As well as this we made a bird hide with camouflage netting over it and plenty of binoculars to spot and count the many birds that come to visit us in the forest. We think a robin has chosen to make its nest in our cottage, so we are excited to see some baby chicks in Spring! One day a giant nest appeared in our garden, with a very colourful bird (hand puppet) atop it. Our curious and observant Little Forest Folk-ers’ soon discovered the bird had laid several eggs, all with different numbered spots on them, which they enjoyed counting. We also read lots of books about birds this week, including ‘Edward the Emu’ and ‘Wow! said the Owl’ which led to delightful conversations about being happy to be yourself, what other animals are nocturnal and agreeing that we all LOVE rainbows!
It was National Hug day on Wednesday so we paused our birding for the day to focus on hugs! We talked about the importance of asking if friends want a hug or not and different times we might enjoy a hug depending on how we are feeling. Our little adventurers also told us all the different people and animals they loved to hug. We then made our own hugs to take home - the children measured their arm span and then cut a coloured ribbon that length. They drew around, then cut out a heart shape of card, which we then wrote a little poem on. Lots of fine motor skills were used in this process, including sticking the heart to the ribbon. We hope all our families enjoyed all their ‘take away hugs!’
The other feature of this week was the weather…. it was so very wet! Our amazing children and resilient staff were not put off though and we got out every day, even if it meant a full change of clothes by the afternoon! Everyone loved building bridges and jumping off platforms into the enormous puddles that had appeared overnight. Digging and transporting water was another favourite activity and last week’s pirate ship set sail once more for adventures anew.
Another great week, we can’t wait for the next!
Little Forest Folk
Winkworth