Our Week in the Forest...
Welcome LFF Chiswick families to 2018!
We hope you all had a lovely festive season packed with fun, food and family. It has been lovely to see our little ones reunited again after the Christmas break, all of them buzzing with excitement and plenty of stories about holidays, presents, and recent adventures.
With the presence of Storm Eleanor this week, we have had to adapt and overcome when faced with the temporary closure of Chiswick House and Gardens. Luckily, we are no strangers to adventure and took the opportunity to set off on walks around our local area in Chiswick, to the local park and along the high road. The children were very excited to stroll around our neighbourhood, and as ever were very curious about what they could see.
One of the recurring conversation topics this week has been safety. When we told the children that Chiswick House and Gardens was closed for a few days, they of course were very curious as to why, and we talked in depth about the effects of the storm. When we adventured to another local park and explored the neighbourhood, we discussed road safety and the importance of ‘stop, look and listen’ when crossing busy roads.
As the storm continued, we brought our forest fun inside and set up ‘basecamp' in the big hall at the Hogarth centre. Despite being inside, the children proved to us that you can take the children out of the forest, but you can’t take the forest out of the children! We created concoctions with magic beans, seeds and acorns, we counted using sticks and ropes, we constructed animals out of salt-dough, we cut and peeled different types of wood and we used our imaginations to go flying, driving, riding and underwater scuba-diving around the unfamiliar play-space.
Friday saw us returning to Kew gardens for the first time since mid-December, and the children were very happy to be back.
We watched as the grounds people at Kew were hard at work planting, raking, weeding and blowing leaves. Some of the children were curious about the tools and machines being used, and we asked the grounds people to explain to us how their leaf blower worked.
Although the sun was out, the water in the ponds and fountains at Kew were still icy cold, so the children scooped water up in leaves to make ‘ice creams’ for all their teachers.
As ever, there were plenty of running races, climbing, sliding, jumping, dancing and spinning around as our little forest folk enjoyed being back outside once again.
Little Forest Folk
Chiswick