Our current fortnightly learning intention has been Literacy and Physical Development, filling the week with exciting opportunities for fun muddy active learning and plenty of story times 📚
Literacy: ‘Develop play around favourite stories using props. Repeat words and phrases from familiar stories’
This week we have been focusing on some Julia Donaldson classics, particularly The Gruffalo. We’ve made this story come to life with some active storytelling, nature walks and re-enactments of the plot. Inspired by the story, we created a checklist of items that indicated there was a cheeky Gruffalo hiding around the grounds. This included: something spikey, Gruffalo’s food, paw prints, the feather from an owl, and much more! Kitted out with magnifying glasses and binoculars, we headed out around the site in search of all these items. Our Little Forest Folk-ers loved the idea of the naughty Gruffalo hiding from them and worked very hard to find any clues. They managed to find everything on their checklists, and everyone got to each mark a tick on the list.
We decided to create our very own Gruffalo faces, using clay and a mixture of nature’s treasures. Our little explorers flattened out their ball of clay into a circle. They then used leaves to mimic the Gruffalo’s ears, small stones as his terrible teeth, and a little off-cutting of leaf as his terrible wart on his terrible nose.
Physical development: ‘Start taking part in activities which they make up for themselves or in teams. Be able to use and remember sequences and patterns related to music/rhythm’
Our Little Forest Folk-ers have been loving the ‘Pete the Cat’ stories, particularly ‘Pete the Cat and his White Shoes’ and ‘Pete the Cat and his Four Groovy Buttons’ - catchy sing along stories which support counting, repetition and sequencing. We regularly sing these tunes in our morning & afternoon circle times, but thought we’d put on a real singing show this week. After some experimenting with our new musical instruments, we all took an instrument and (led by educator Sabrina) beat/shook/tapped our instruments along to the beat of the tune. We saw great pattern recognition skills and created some funky sounds together!
It's been a wonderful week, we hope everyone has a lovely weekend!
Little Forest Folk
Fulham