What a beautiful Spring day to end a gorgeous week
This week has been an interesting week where our ethos of learning has been aptly demonstrated by our activities. We planned this week to continue our theme of talking about love and families. Our children wanted to climb! It has been an incredible week for physical development as the children haven't stopped. We suspect you've had some good sleepers this week!
In order to allow the forest to have a bit of a break from little stomping wellies, we this week moved our basecamp to the top of the meadow. The children have been so excited at the new base that they've spent the entire week physically bounding around it. We've spent at least half their days in trees as our new climbing tree is a bit more challenging than our old climbing tree. We have been risk assessing new climbing paths and working out strategies to summit the trees then have had great fun practicing our coordination and balance. We've challenged ourselves further with fallen trees with balance beam walks across trying not to fall off!
Climbing in the forest
We've had lots of running games, lots of jumping and lots of swinging. In continuation of being a week full of physical energy (what have you been feeding these children for breakfast this week!?) we've had lots of fine motor skills work. We've collected bugs on bug hunts, we've used tools to create some lovely playing areas in the new basecamp and we've worked on threading up our own forest abacus. We've been whittling sticks and now have quite the stash of perfect marshmallow toasting sticks!
Whittling sticks in the forest
Finally for cooking this week the children made sweetcorn fritters with pitta, mango and baby spinach followed by a baked apricot pudding. Delicious! And difficult to resist tucking in ourselves!
News
We are getting very excited about our open day in Chiswick next week. Do feel free to pop along and visit us on our open day on Thursday 17th March to see what Chiswick will be all about.
As it's starting to warm up, children may no longer need their thermal snow boots soon, so we have negotiated a discount with a supplier of warm wellies. These wellies are neoprene based which makes them extremely flexible for easy running in, plus they have great grips and are much warmer than standard wellies so we highly recommend them.
Staffing
You may have noticed a few new friendly faces in Wimbledon over the past couple of weeks. We are welcoming 'new' Jose and Karin to join Lil for Team Wandsworth, then Rachael will be taking over Team Chiswick. All of our staff will move between the nurseries every now and then for good experience so although these staff will be based elsewhere, you will still be seeing them from time to time.
We also welcome 'new' Jenny to join 'old' Jenny in Wimbledon. Jenny joins us from Scandinavia and brings a great love of the outdoors to her part time role. We will also over the next few weeks be welcoming Colleen and Marianna to the Wimbledon team. No staff are leaving us but now we are operating at absolute capacity in Wimbledon we have decided to introduce a few new team members to allow us more time to play with the children.
Marvin has left us and we will now be welcoming Claudette as our new driver. Claudette is a local mum and after her experiencing of driving London double decker buses, transporting children in our Little Forest Folk truck is a breeze!
See our Little Forest Folk team page :-)
Dressing for the weather
It's time to peel off a top layer! The weather is warming up nicely. We look forward in the next few weeks to dispersing with lots of layers!
- Thermal layer - M&S have some great thermal long sleeve tops and leggings
- Fleecy trousers
- Thin jumper
- Thicker fleece/wool jumper
- Thick fleecy zip up jacket - Mini Boden have some fab warm shaggy jackets on sale
- Scarf
- Hat
- Gloves - lots of pairs of gloves to ensure when they get wet we have a replacement
- Thin cotton socks
- Thick wool socks or the horrible polyester socks they sell near the checkout at H&M which are super warm!
- Wellies/thermal boots/snow boots
Next week in the forest
Next week in the forest we are going to be spending a week celebrating St Patrick's Day! We'll be making shamrocks, learning about St Patrick's Day and maybe even doing some Irish jigs!
Menu
Spring menu sneak preview - Halloumi and pesto pasta
Now that all new starters are fully settled, we look forward to shortly introducing our rotating new Spring menu to allow the children to enjoy more of our delicious food. Our children have this week devoured..... see our Little Forest Folk menu
Enjoy your weekend and we look forward to lots more fun next week!
Little Forest Folk
