Our Week in the Forest
This week at Forest Nursery, our little explorers embarked on a journey that blended the beauty of the natural world with the excitement of faraway places - real and imagined. Through rich sensory play, stories, and shared experiences, the children discovered new textures, traditions and ideas, all while growing their understanding of the world around them.
Our younger learners focused on exploring the natural world, while our older children began to explore people, cultures and communities, developing their sense of identity and curiosity about others. And through it all, their play, questions and imagination lit the path forward. 🌙🚀🍂🌿
Exploring Nature with All Our Senses
For our two-year-olds, the forest offered endless opportunities to touch, smell, see and hear the wonders around them. Mud, leaves, pinecones and apples became tools for learning and laughter.
From crafting with sticks and leaves to rolling apples in paint without using hands (producing some truly magical “magi-app-ple” prints!), the children explored texture, movement and colour in joyful, creative ways. 🍎🎨
On our adventure walks, children delighted in sniffing freshly cut fruits and veggies, feeling the skin of apples and squash and hunting for the most vibrant autumn leaves. Their awe and wonder were unmistakable as they discovered the tiniest details in nature - from the crunch of dry leaves to the shine of a dew-dropped spiderweb.
🌕🛰️ From Mooncakes to Moonwalks
Our older children journeyed far beyond the forest this week, beginning with the Moon Festival and the legend of Chang’e. We explored Chinese traditions, shaped clay mooncakes and tested natural objects in water, sparking conversations about floating, sinking and sharing space.
Later in the week, we rocketed into space! The children created alien masks, decorated spaceships with fiery red leaves and used their creativity to craft their very own “neckl-sp-aces” - adorned with cardboard planets, stars and moons. 🚀🌙 A huge highlight was our spaceship construction challenge! A tall, climbable launchpad reaching up toward the “stars.” 🌌🧑🚀 Children climbed, balanced and cheered each other on as they took turns “blasting off” into space - and even stopped to take photos pretending to be brave astronauts exploring new worlds. 📸👩🚀✨ Another favourite moment was our “telescope” made from a simple pipe - proving that when imagination is the lens, even the simplest tools can become portals to other worlds. And as our big spinning travel box whirled us round and round, we giggled and took turns, just like Earth circling the sun. 🌍☀️
💚 Communities, Kindness & Creativity
Our learning about communities continued on a very special note when the children made a muddy birthday cake together for a much-loved member of our nursery. Their care and kindness were truly heartwarming - showing how connected and thoughtful this little community is becoming. 🥳🎂
Throughout the week, children came together to build bridges for animals to cross imagined lakes, worked as a team to colour a giant dragon painting 🐉 and joyfully chased bubbles across the playground. Every moment was filled with laughter, cooperation and the spark of shared creativity.
🌟 Reflections
This week, the forest was more than just a setting - it was a launchpad for wonder 🌲🚀. Whether travelling through space, celebrating cultural traditions, or simply noticing the crunch of leaves underfoot and the rocks half-buried in the earth, our children led the way with curiosity and enthusiasm 🌍💭.
It was a week rich in sensory discovery, imagination and shared stories. The children explored natural materials, textures and smells through playful, hands-on experiences, and celebrated diversity through stories of festivals, space travel, apples and astronauts 🍎🪐. As always, we followed their lead - nurturing their ideas, embracing their questions and celebrating their joy in learning. We can’t wait to see where their curiosity takes us next 💫❤️.
Little Forest Folk
Fulham