Our arts and crafts table has been very busy as one day we made owl masks and hooted our way round the forest flapping our arms and swooping around. Some of the children pretended they were the baby owls sitting on crates (branches) and others were mummy owls flying silently back to the babies.

What an exciting week we’ve had learning about hibernation and sleeping through winter! We’ve learnt that some animals sleep for long periods of time, whilst others (like squirrels) sleep for 2-3 weeks and then wake up to eat to keep warm and feed. 

Welcome back everyone, we are so pleased to see you all again! The children have been thrilled to return to the back section of our forest as we have moved into a different section for the next 3 months, which will allow our other zone to have a rest from the impact of 20 children per day running around and exploring! Our move also offers us a chance to explore a new area of the forest in a different season.

Thank you all for attending our wonderful Christmas party on Friday, we all had a wonderful time welcoming you into the forest. We enjoyed roasting marshmallows around the fire and creating delicious gooey smores, and sipping on hot chocolate, coffee and Gluhwein (mulled wine)

We have painted a huge cardboard box snowman, a row of gingerbread houses made from recycled boxes, gnomes made from planks of wood wearing spare hats, scarfs and so many more things! 

We have had a lovely, crispy, wintery, autumnal, sunshine week immersed in literature and language, reading stories as well as making up our own stories and writing them down. 

“The Jolly Postman” story is a classic and the children were thrilled to learn about his postal route as he cycled around delivering mail to a variety of fairytale characters.

With a sharp dip in the temperature this week we have bundled up with more layers, including hats, gloves and snoods. We enjoyed running games and dancing in the first snowfall of winter. My goodness they were huge snow flakes!

What glorious autumn weather we have had this week. We have loved our potion and medicine creation in the mud kitchen, the reading corners with books about numbers, weights and measures have been really popular and our role playing has been rich.

This week started with a bang as we have been learning about fireworks and painting beautiful pictures in various ways, such as splattering paint onto a large canvas, as well as using carefully snipped loo roll tubes dipped into paint as stamps to create the explosive image of the firework.

We set ourselves the task of carving a small pumpkin each day. Learning about where they grow and how they grow.

Our week has been very creative, slightly spooky, autumnal and sensory based as we have crunched the autumn leaves between our hands and fingers and sprinkled them into witchy potions in the mud kitchen.

This week we have continued to explore the concept of families. Who do we live with? Mummies, daddies, siblings, grandparents

This week we have been learning about families, our own small network including mummy, daddy, brothers, sisters, granny and grandpa. We have also printed all the painty hand prints of our Twickenham Little Forest Folk Family.  We’ve read and talked about families throughout the world, and considered families in China celebrating the Mid Autumn/Moon festival.

We have had a glorious week of exploring the forest through our senses and extending our vocabulary. Sticky, orange, ooblek with its combined dribblyness and stiff qualities, perplexed and excited our curious minds. We also enjoyed tweezer work with natural elements like smooth conkers, rough pine cones, small, hard, ash keys, small greenish acorns and soft feathery grasses.

This week the children have delighted in creating puppet shows, making up their own stories as well as retelling favourite stories.

Our new children are feeling more settled and exploring more areas of the forest too now! 

This week we have embraced the sun, shade and all the joyous activities in the forest. The new children are all settling in, observing, continuing to explore more areas of the forest and tasting new meals. 

September has arrived, bringing with it the first golden hints of autumn. As the leaves begin to change colour, we’ve said fond farewells to many of our older children, sending them off with hugs and promises to see them again at our Holiday Camps.

At the start of our week we celebrated international dog day with a vet role playing area as the children looked after and cared for all the (toy) dogs we had in the forest.