Over the past few days, we’ve rolled over the play ideas of the children that all very much enjoyed being pirates or sailors last week. From the very start of the day after breakfast, children have been rolling, lifting, and shifting all the logs, planks, nets and parts into even more magnificently mountainesque galleons fit for a formidable crew. We have loved watching older children master their lifting skills around all these unusually shaped weighty parts, and we’ve loved helping our newest starters work out the best way to move these bits and themselves successfully from A to B! This week these oceanic make-believe games have been embellished with rolled pirate maps designed in our art areas, with X marks-the-spots, and N, E, S, W compasses helping children to begin valuing the relevance of letters in our lives.
Pirates need food, so fishing rods were constructed, with our little ones doing a great job finding big, long sticks, and our older children proudly showing us their knot skills to finish the tools. We all love Dan’s version of this game, where he has attached a magnetic part as the hook and slipped large paperclips onto handmade felt fish. These fish are numbered which gives children an opportunity to aim for familiar numbers, or Educators would support with the language of near and far distance or maybe early colour recognition. Whatever the way this game is approached, the cheers, smiles and applause clearly tells us it’s incredible fun!
Over several days this week the creativity has continued with some confident woodworking skills. Elders grow in abundance here, and with permission from the Conservators we are allowed to saw and use some of the thinner branches. There are many awesome activities we can use these for and this week we have showed everyone how to poke the central core of pith out with tent pegs. With pre-made inch long pieces ready, educators first modelled the best way to hold parts safely, in a way that helps us all to respect the potential risks of using the simple peg tool. Where needed, children have confidently asked for help, and soon a pile of hollow “beads” were good to go! Design discussions, rich in number and measurement talk, then helped children to plan and visualise their creative ideas which informed the threading process. Next, one bit of knot practice to finish the piece, followed by a happy adorning moment were everyone can celebrate the success! We love this activity here which is so full of natural creativity as it really helps children strengthen fingers whilst delivering a tangible sense of personal achievement. We can’t wait to start making puppets with the same technique and we’re sure your children will love to show you!
We hope you all have a great weekend, and we can’t wait to hear all about it soon!
Little Forest Folk
Wandsworth