Welcome back to the forest, we have had a lovely week. The weather has been pleasantly warm as we’ve played, learnt, socialised, laughed and grown under the shade of our huge Plane Tree.

We set up a puppet show area one day and the children thoroughly enjoyed using the puppets to tell stories. Some children made up their own stories, and others re-enacted their favourite stories such as “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”. As this story was told, some children ran off to our loose parts zone and created a bridge using crates and planks. Borrowing some blue material from our cloth resources they created the river under the bridge and they all took turns being the troll under the bridge while others were the goats. This in turn led to our Little Forest Folk-ers wanting to write their own stories so they each dictated their story to the resident educator scribe who then wrote it down for them. They were all very excited to share their literary accomplishment, asking educators to read their stories aloud. Their confidence grew as their friends came to see the puppet shows and listen to their stories.

We have had a lot of play surrounding the alphabet as our Little Forest Folk-ers have shown a lot of interest in what each letter sounds like and which letters are a part of their names. We hid an entire alphabet on the tuff tray and covered it in dry sand and they had to hunt through the sand and try to find the letters in their names. Our younger children were happy to find the first letter of their names, and our older children delighted in finding as many letters in their names as they could.

We had a marvelous game invented by a staff member where each letter of the alphabet had been hand-drawn on 5x5cm sized pieces of card board. We had the upper case letters and the lower case letters of the alphabet. Then we muddled them all up and had to match the letters up. The V and v were easy, the O and o were also easy but the B and b were a little tricky and the F and f were too. The children of all ages returned to this game throughout the week.

A few of our older children decided our mud kitchen was messy and so a full spring cleaning crew set to work washing pots and pans, cleaning the mud kitchen cupboards, and wiping down the recipe cards. Their focus throughout this child-led task was great, although the crew did change a few times as some of the Little Forest Folk-ers lost interest after they washed up a few pots and pans and went to find another activity to enjoy!

Thanks for coming to the forest. See you again next time.

Little Forest Folk
Twickenham