Our Week in the Forest...
What a lovely week it has been, meeting new faces and saying hello to old ones. It has been great to welcome in an older age group during holiday camp and to see siblings enjoying what the forest has to offer together. We’ve witnessed some great role-modelling this week from the elder children (and younger one’s also!), and we were impressed with the memory they had of the Forest School rules. They have all really enjoyed getting stuck in with play.
In the mornings, we took the children on adventure walks and revisited familiar places around the forest such as Grandma’s Cottage and the lake. Our Little Forest Folk-ers busily balanced across thick tree trunks and had the chance to practise some jumping too. Back at camp, we laid sticks across a checklist, on pictures of creatures and fauna that we had seen around the forest. There has been lots of tree-climbing this week and the children have also really enjoyed running around and zipping up and down the forest to try to be the first one to catch a tennis ball. Simon also buried a ‘pot of gold’ which the children loved hunting down.
There has been a lot of creative flair in the forest this week. The music speaker made an appearance, with special requests for the Ghostbusters theme-tune, ‘Never Smile at a Crocodile’ and Frozen 2. We saw some brilliant dance moves! Extensive treasure maps were created and swords, bows and arrows were made from sticks and string. Camp also turned into a fire station as the children span down fire-poles, rode in fire-helicopters and used stick-hoses to tackle imaginary fires in the trees. They also pretended to rescue some animals that were stuck in the trees too.
Our Little Forest Folk-ers also noticed smaller details in their environment, whether it was catching falling hailstones or taking ‘bark sketches’ with pencils on paper and observing the textures of different trees. The children were busy searching for mini-beasts under logs and counted lots of wiggly worms; they even found a toad! It has been a lovely, wet week to share with new and familiar friends that we hope to see again – until the next holiday camp! We hope you all have a happy weekend.
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth