11.11.20

Today is Remembrance Day. We talked about why we have Remembrance Day and why we wear poppies. We worked together to make a land art picture of a poppy as our tribute to 'the fallen'. We had to rake clear an area, collect lots of colourful leaves, mark out our petals and fill them with leaves. Afterwards we added a stalk. We collaborated very well and think our poppy looks great! 

4.11.20

We read, ‘We’re going on a leaf hunt’. We joined in with the repetitive phrases as we acted out the story then we did lots of lead related activities! We went on a leaf hunt to find the most interesting leaf we could. We found colourful leaves, rainbow leaves, nibbled by mini-beast leaves and ones where insects had left ‘trails’ in the leaf as they had nibbled it away. Some of us made leaf trees by threading leaves onto twigs, some of us tidied up the leaves around school and added them to our compost bin.

September/October 2020

A new year and lots of new routines to get used to, including at Forest School! It has been lovely to get back outside with the children though and they adjusted to new routines well. We have been practising reading our key words by using the ‘picture tree’ - we read a word and draw a picture about it and peg it to the tree for the session for everyone to see. Because lots of us have had quite a while away from school, we have been building up our finger, hand and arm muscles to help with writing so lots of fun activities in the water kitchen, threading and swinging have been helping with this (not to mention it’s fun too!).

We have spent a lot of time noticing the changes of the season week by week as well the weather. We have been watching the leaves change colour as well as the berries and nuts on the trees. We have talked about harvest, looked at seed heads and collected seeds to scatter. We have looked at and described the flowers and herbs using all of our senses. All of this leads to much discussion and reminders of what their names are, facts about various plants as well as ‘hands on experience’, touching and feeling them. We have helped tidy up the leaves around school (great for building our muscle strength too). We have been thinking of lots of adjectives to describe all of these things which has fitted in well with our work in class where we have also been learning about adjectives. In one session we felt for an ‘autumn object’ in the bag and had to describe it so that others could guess what it was. We also played a memory game with autumn objects, memorising the objects to say which one had disappeared when the cloth was taken away. 

Our last session was rather a wet one. We of course enjoyed splashing in muddy puddles but our main activity was ‘worm charming’! We watched some clips about people having competitions to charm the most worms of the ground so we got into groups, collected some equipment and became worm charmers. We put the worm we collected into the leaf compost bin where they will hopefully turn the leaves into compost. We did an amazing job and used lots of the techniques we saw on the video clip to charm the worms into coming out although we did ’cheat’ slightly as most of the worms we found under logs and leaves!

Of course we have also enjoyed ‘Off You Go! Time’, building and exploring, balancing and dragging each other around on tyres.