Our Week in the Forest
We have had a wonderful week, albeit a sweltering one - so we made sure to incorporate plenty of water play to keep cool throughout the week! On Monday, the children explored what would float and what would sink using some items provided by the educators and more that were found around camp. The warm weather also gave our educators quality time to talk about why we need to be careful in the sun and why we need more water breaks built into our day - some of the children can even now be heard calling ‘water break’ before the adults!
The educators helped develop the children’s ideas about floating and sinking by exploring ‘icebergs’. The children floated large lumps of ice on water and found out that it did not matter how big the ‘iceberg’ was, it still floated! They were also faced with some challenges: how could they free sea creatures and bugs frozen in the icebergs? In the end, the heat really helped with this, whilst also allowing educators the opportunity to talk about ice melting when it was warm and freezing when it was cooled down.
The rain on Wednesday was very welcome and because we have been talking a lot about the importance of bees on our adventure walks, the children were encouraged to become ‘bees’ on camp and collect pollen which had been carefully hidden in different places. To build on the children’s fine motor skills, they had to use tweezers to collect little ‘balls of pollen’ on the tuff tray and place them into a ‘hive’. Our little explorers also developed their core and gross motor skills by collecting pollen from high up in the trees (small yellow balls) using our litter pickers and carrying their findings back to the hive again - the ‘busy bees’ were so good at this, the educators couldn’t get the pollen back out into the trees quick enough!
To focus on our intentions throughout the week, educators (and confident children!) taught new, and practiced known songs that involved speckled frogs, naughty monkeys, buzzing bees, continents, red shoes and boundaries - what a wide range of subjects! We have also been working on our ‘Days of the Week’ song and have used our wonderful ‘Days of the Week’ mobile (created by the children and educators two weeks ago) to begin to count down days - for example, on Thursday we asked the children: “How many days is it until Monday?” and counted the days down with them. We will build on this next week, using calendars.
We also did some more work on finding and creating patterns, which many of our Little Forest Folk-ers find a little tricky. To do this, we took inspiration from the book ‘Paper Dolls’, a story that the children love hearing. The children had the opportunity to create their own paper dolls (repeated pattern) and take them on adventures around camp. Some dolls were so tired after their adventures, they needed to be put to bed! We also looked at the paper left behind, noticing that this too was a repeated pattern, and decided to use this to create crowns!
Finally, we got to taste the potatoes we harvested last week - Two Teaspoons created a lovely potato curry, which we had a taste of on Tuesday evening for dinner.
We are counting the days till we see you all back next week! Have a wonderful weekend all!
Little Forest Folk
Wimbledon Village