We have had a wonderful week in the forest building up our fine and gross motor skills, exploring the world around us, and thinking of others.

We have continued to work on our garden this week pulling weeds, planting seeds, repotting seedlings, and investigating growth of our plants.

Our main story of the week has been the classic “gingerbread man” story. We have enjoyed making salt dough and creating our own gingerbread men. Some of our Little Forest Folk-ers made gingerbread cows, cats, foxes and a little old lady, all the while chatting about the story.

At the drawing table we had a road drawn across a very large piece of brown paper. With small world animals and people and pens available to continue illustrating the story, we role played the story with cows and horses chasing the gingerbread man down the hand drawn road on the paper, we then drew in the river and the fox helped the gingerbread man get partially across before eating him up.

On the obstacle course the children enjoyed trying to figure out how to build a bridge across the blue material “our river”. How could they safely cross the river? If there had been a bridge would the gingerbread boy have escaped? Would the fox be hungry?

We have also been excited by animals in the forest this week. We had a visitor in the form of a limping pigeon that we were concerned about but he flew away, an injured bee we put in the shade with some sugary water, and a curious squirrel who kept trying to get food out of our rubbish bin. We have loved looking through our WWF magazines, as we cut or tore out our favourite animals and created fantastical collages such as a cheetah on a giant ant, lemur eyes in a tree and a whale in a garden.

We have enjoyed stories, playing with clay, singing songs and making thank you cards for our friends and plaiting friendship bracelets to give to each other. We also practised saying one thing we like about our friends.

Thanks for coming to the forest, see you again next time!

Little Forest Folk
Twickenham