Our Week in the Forest
This week has been all about team work, shared and sustained play, safety and construction!
This week saw our small, teepee construction become a drive through, where children used an old hoover hose to talk through to order their food and then drove up to the ‘window’ to collect their order. There were some amazing concoctions of flavours, all very healthy, including blueberry, strawberry and vanilla - complete with unicorn and birthday sprinkles, should you want them! This area also became a cafe, a home, a shop and even a hospital at one point! This enabled our wonderful team of explorers to invent a wide range of complex storylines, conversations and actions - with some fabulous links to both real world and some of the books that we have been reading.
On one of our days, we all worked as a team to create some amazing vehicles with our group of budding mechanics. Sam helped the children to measure and cut their dowel using a saw and some sandpaper to sand down any rough edges. Both he and Jordan supported the children in constructing the body of their car (a cardboard box), put the dowel axle through and then hammer on their wheels. The children then went to the next station to work with Paula to create their vision or outline for their car (if they wanted to) and then they designed and coloured the body in the way that they wanted to. What was amazing, was seeing the children then become budding race car drivers, bus drivers or fire engine drivers and driving their vehicles around the raked out ‘road’ on camp - meaning that there were some muddy and broken cars by the end of the day - but a huge amount of learning and fun during!
On another day, our educators turned our climbing area into an ‘emergency vehicle’ and again our old hoover hose came into use - with calls of, “What is your emergency?” making their way down the line. Our Little Forest Folk-ers created whole storylines around whether there was the need for our vehicle to transform into a fire engine, an ambulance and at one point, even a rescue helicopter! Clearly our intrepid heroes were ready for all manner of emergencies and saved the day again and again - thank goodness!
Throughout all of these creative, story-filled activities, our Little Forest Folk-ers also enjoyed an afternoon disco, a mushroom hunt, leaf printing and painting, clear tarp painting and cleaning, creating a flower garden and flower cakes, using diggers and tractors to clear mountains of cornflakes, checking to see whether the spring or ‘Andrew and Ella the Whales’ had returned (they hadn’t!), painting masks, ladder climbing, web crawling, tower building and story reading! What a gloriously busy week!
Have a wonderful weekend everyone - we look forward to seeing you for more fun, learning and great teamwork next week!
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon Village