Our Week in the Forest
🎶Five crispy pancakes in a frying pan, flip them and toss them and catch them if you can. Along came (Child's name) for a pancake one day. S/He sprinkled it with sugar and took it away…..Four crispy pancakes in a frying pan, Flip them and toss them and catch them if you can. 🎶
This was just one of the many songs we enjoyed on pancake day, huddled around the fire, mixing, pouring, cooking, flipping and serving pancakes with all the children!
As well as pancake fun, our Little Forest Folk-ers’ also enjoyed some blue sky days outside playing with diggers, building with magnet tiles and climbing the wooden pallet structures.
One particularly wonderful activity was ‘sticker making’. One of our lovely educators took the children’s beautiful drawings and using grease proof baking paper and sellotape, turned them into fabulous stickers, some of which the children adorned themselves with for the whole day!
This week we also celebrated Chinese New Year with a host of crafts and celebrations! Our little adventurers made colourful paper lanterns, practicing their scissor and sticking skills. On another day they enjoyed making firework pictures with toilet tubes and fluorescent paint on black card. They also threaded red and gold beads on cord to make special bracelets to celebrate too.
We also got our child-friendly instant cameras out to take photos of each other with fun moustaches, hats and glasses to wear, but these were soon usurped by face painting by our talented educators!
The star of the week was probably the dragon head, rustled up out of a cardboard box, which was lots of fun to wear and roar and chase each other round the garden with. Some of our little explorers even made dens out of sticks and branches to keep each other safe from the ferocious dragon. We also made some fire breathing dragons with paper cups and tissue paper and talked about the great race of Chinese New Year, taking time to learn the animals for our own birth years!
All of these exciting experiences support the UK Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) by promoting communication and language through songs and storytelling, developing physical skills through cutting, climbing and mark-making, encouraging expressive arts and design through crafts and role play, fostering personal, social and emotional development as the children collaborate and celebrate cultural traditions to increase their understanding of the world around them.
Little Forest Folk
Winkworth