Our Week in the Forest
As the last of everyone's holidays are drawing to close for our families and staff, it has been wonderful to be reunited with lots of our summer holiday explorers. We have read through fabulous postcards that we have received and talked about some of the things that the children have done, where they have been to and what they may have learned whilst away. It has been amazing to see how much they have grown in both physical and emotional terms - and for many of our Little Forest Folk-ers, you would never know they had been away as they have adjusted back into their routines so naturally!
This week, the children have enjoyed becoming super heroes and used the masks they were given as inspiration for creating masks of their own. These masks took many forms, from Chase (Paw Patrol), to Elsa (Frozen) and also some wonderfully surreal ones being created!
The children got ‘hands on’ and sticky, mixing flour with clay to see what happened and were reintroduced to the Zones of Regulation and the colour monsters to enable them to feel more confident in recognising and talking about how they feel. Through teaching our wonderful children different colour-coded zones (Blue, Green, Yellow, Red), our lovely educators can provide a common language and a personal "toolbox" of strategies to help them understand both how they feel and how others around them may be feeling. Alongside the reintroduction of the zones, we also thought about how we develop friendships, especially when new explorers join us, like we have had recently, and our little adventurers quickly involved their new friends in their imaginative play. This culminated in the creation of a full theatre production, with educators being given snacks and reminded that they needed to stay quiet as the curtains rose!
Our little explorers also enjoyed ‘tidying’ up the forest, using the litter pickers and the wheelbarrow, creating shelters for ‘pet’ woodlice, to keep them safe and warm when it rained (which it did quite heavily intermittently!), creating treasure maps and colouring their own monsters to show how they were feeling!
A wonderfully colourful week, have a fabulous weekend everyone!
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon Village