Our week in the forest!
We have had a wonderful week as we welcomed back our holiday campers. Some were new friends, others were friends from last year and we were delighted to see them all!
We set ourselves the task of carving a small pumpkin each day. Learning about where they grow and how they grow. The intrepid Little Forest Folk-ers have scooped, spooned and grabbed the slimy, slippery, seed-filled contents out of each pumpkin. Every day one child has been the artist of the pumpkin’s face, drawing on large eyes, small eyes, scary mouth, happy mouth and oddly shaped noses - our pumpkins have scared even our squirrels! An educator, armed with a small knife, has done the carving and we have used sticks to create hair sticking up from the pumpkin’s head.
We have seen lots of lovely costumes in the forest from Groot, to ghosts, a cheeky little devil, and a bevy of little witches. The mud kitchen has been a hive of potion creation, we have made Halloween-coloured playdough with flour, water, oil and paint, which was lovely and soft as we rolled it out into snakes and worms. The book reading area has been very popular with “Room on the Broom” by Julia Donaldson, “Wake up Do, Lydia Lou” by Julia Donaldson, “Spinderella” by Julia Donaldson, The Meg and Mog books, “Funny Bones” by Alan Ahlberg, and “Winnie the Witch” by Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul, being the most popular stories this week.
We have created spiders with black pipe cleaners and spider webs with softly coloured wool, plus we also created a huge, horizontal spider’s web using rope tied between trees, tyres, logs and other uprights. The children could crawl under the web or climb over, lifting their legs high while stepping over each strand of web silk. We had an activity of hide and seek in the tuff tray with a slimy, shaving foam mixture hiding jewels, treasures and natural items. We had to use tweezers to find the items and pick them up and rescue them from the slimy foam.
The base of our Linden tree currently has a lot of suckers growing out of it and so we used our loppers to trim back the suckers. We now have a plan for them; to plant a circle of suckers in a corner of our play area so they are standing upright. Armed with the rest of our suckers we will weave the slim bendy branches in and out of the uprights creating a strong wicker wall. This is an ongoing project that will take about 2 weeks to complete with the help of the children. Soon we’ll have a little den that the children will have helped to build.
Thanks for coming to the forest for another wonderful week!
Little Forest Folk
Twickenham