It's a week for new arrivals. This week George became a proud big brother to Oliver and we have two more LFF babies arriving today. Exciting times and congratulations!
We also welcomed the new arrival of Judith to our Little Forest Folk team. Judith is a biologist from Germany who has been working in nature education in London for the past few years, most recently at the Barnes Wetland Centre. We welcome her in depth scientific knowledge, her smiling good nature and are always happy to add another foreign language speaker to the team.
Out in the forest it's been a beautiful week full of gorgeous sunshine. Who would even guess we are in October? How much more satisfying is the sun on your face in Autumn rather than Summer, when you feel constantly grateful for the unseasonably warm weather.
This week we've been working on combining maths with understanding the world. We've been collecting and sorting a variety of natural objects to enhance our understanding of quantities, have been encouraging groupings of colours, sizes, shapes and have also been working on our visual recognition of numbers and playing lots of number games. Check out our video on Facebook to see our style of maths lesson with the children. Great fun!
We've had great cries of pride and confidence as the children have pushed themselves a little further with climbing trees. It's so lovely to see how excited they are to have got themselves 2-3 feet up a tree 'Look at ME! I'm so HIGH!' as it's an accomplishment they have managed all by themselves and which deserves their pride in their capabilities and confidence.
This week also saw the trial of the first of our weekly cooking lessons with the children. We want to teach children more about healthy lifestyles and encourage the adoption of healthy eating. We believe understanding the importance of nutrition is easier if from a young age children have been active participants in food preparation and if allowed to take opportunities to ask the questions we can answer to explain what constitutes a healthy balanced diet. The children made a marinade for olives to take home with them (although by all accounts the olives didn't last long once they were home) and also made a feta, pea, mint and grain salad. We LOVE the fact that some of the children so enjoyed the ingredients that they couldn't resist sampling a few items. Isn't that the best sort of cooking?!
Great thanks to Becky from Bea's Handmade for our first fab cookery lesson! :-)