What a fab week in the forest, starting our celebrations for The Chinese New Year. After educator Claudia gave our Little Forest Folk-ers an introduction to what the two week celebration entails last week, we felt equipped to decorate camp, head-to-toe in Lunar New Year fun! 🇨🇳🎎🉐
Here’s some of the fun we got up to this week…
Snake Stepping Stones 🧗
We couldn’t help but put a lunar twist on our usual assault course constructions. As it’s the year of the Snake, our climbing apparatus has been fashioned with this in mind, making winding courses with equal fun to challenge. Tree stumps were gathered and placed in a bending shape through the centre of camp, which children had to navigate accordingly. After stepping up and over, crouching and balancing, they made it to the face of the snake, where a snake’s tongue and beady eyes were waiting!
Paper Chain Snakes 🐍
We got very creative this week and took a few crafty approaches towards creating our own snakes. Our Little Forest Folk-ers were taught (and mastered!) the art of paper chain making, using their bilateral hand coordination to do multiple things at once! They displayed great step-following and pattern recognition skills. Children developed their hand eye coordination and scissor cutting skills by cutting a spiral out of a paper plate, which became a 3D winding spiral, once some googly eyes were attached, it looked the spitting image of a real snake!
Lantern Making 🎊
Using colourful card and some impressive scissor skills, our little adventurers created Chinese lanterns to help decorate our camp for our celebration.
Chinese Take-away Mud Kitchen 🍜
Kung Po Chicken, Soup and Dumplings please! Our mud kitchen was transformed into a Chinese takeaway, where twigs became chopsticks so we could tuck into our tasty creations. Children asked the educators what they would like to order and got cracking, mixing together water, mud, stones and leaves to make delicious noodle dishes.
Cherry Blossom Tree Decorating 🌺
We discussed and observed images of beautiful Cherry Blossom Trees and made connections between them and some of the plants we see in our Walled Garden with similar petals of beautiful pink. Educators created an image of a tree with empty branches, ready to be filled with small Cherry Blossom Flowers. Children used non-traditional painting methods by repurposing twigs to act as mark making utensils, as well as their fingers. They mixed red and white paint and got stuck in adding stunning petals to the empty branches.
Clay Dumplings 🥟
Our little explorers were inspired by Chinese dumplings and used them as a prompt when fashioning clay creations. Children rolled balls of clay and pushed, squeezed and pinched the material, moulding it into their desired shape. They looked just like yummy vegetable filled dumplings, good enough to eat!
What a wonderful week, we hope everyone has a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham