In the HUB, our new curriculum unit is ‘What’s at the bottom of the garden?‘. Today, the children took part in a fun activity which involved searching our forest school area for creatures and living things!
Category : Forest School
Thank you to everyone that came to our festive ‘stay and play’!
It was wonderful to see the children getting stuck in with some festive Christmas crafts in the cabin! A merry atmosphere and an opportunity to chat alongside some mince pies and warm drinks! The children made some fabulous Christmas cards and decorations and enjoyed some of our sensory explorations tough trays with a little Christmas music!
This afternoon the children in HUB 1 had a lovely afternoon exploring the great outdoors and getting crafty in the cabin! Our favourite kind of afternoon spent exploring our senses and regulating in the great outdoors!
We love anything that’s messy and involves paint, so Mrs. Buss’s idea to explore some bonfire themed colours and mix using sticks was just up our street! A great sensory session for encouraging again those fine motor skills and encouraging self expression and creativity! The children loved being outside in our very autumnal forest garden and explored the variety of leaves looking at colour, size and what happens as they fall to the ground! We had a special treat at the end of the day with some yummy hot chocolates and marshmallows, a great opportunity to sit together in our forest school circle and encourage some social and communication opportunities!
Here are some fab photos of the children highly engaged and involved in our forest afternoon…
This afternoon during our ‘curriculum time‘ the children explored Autumnal colours and manipulating paint with their hands and tools! We have been spending a lot of time in our outside cabin looking for signs of Autumn and the changes in the season, exploring the leaves and colours! Today we decided to paint our own Autumn tree, using the colours we had spotted from our nature expeditions!
The children loved creating trunks and branches with a brush, working on their fine motor skills and loved getting their fingers and hands messy for a sensory experience!
Today was a truly special autumn celebration in F2! We’ve been getting up to all sorts of wonderful activities to explore the magic of the season. The children loved painting beautiful autumn trees and making colourful leaf shapes in rice.
Our visit to the forest school was a real highlight — everyone had such fun finding different autumn leaves and sticks to create their very own magic autumn wands! We sat together on the logs, enjoying the crisp autumn air and warming up with a cosy cup of hot chocolate as the days start to get chillier.
It was a day full of creativity, exploration, and smiles — the children had so much fun celebrating autumn! ✨
This afternoon we had several Autumnal activities where we explored pumpkins, made fairy stick wands and tasted yummy hot chocolate!
The children loved exploring inside a pumpkin and discovering lots of seeds and sticky squishy pumpkin mash! This was a great sensory experience and we enjoyed using our fine motor skills to scoop out the pumpkin contents and explore our senses of touch and smell!
In our outdoor forest school we joined some children in Foundation Stage to make and decorate some stick wands! This was lots of fun and got our fingers moving-wrapping and threading ribbon and bits of Autumnal foliage!
We enjoyed chatting to new friends over a hot chocolate and exploring the great outdoors, practicing our balancing skills on the logs and attempting to do this independently!
A lovely afternoon in our forest school garden where the children definitely seem their happiest!
This week in Hub 1 we have done lots of ‘getting messy activities‘ to encourage our fine and gross motor skills! From painting activities, muddy play, shaving foam squeezing and pumpkin discovering… we have been given lots of opportunities to get our hands moving and really get stuck in with some sensory exploration! Messy play is an extremely important part of our learning and development, enhancing those early sensory exploration skills, alongside fostering creativity and problem solving, promoting emotional regulation and encouraging and supporting language development!
These experiences have led to lots of open ended communication opportunities and encouraging the use of vocabulary and expressing needs and wants! The children have loved joining in with all these activities and had a wonderful afternoon welcoming some parents in to join us in our ‘stay and play‘ session on Monday afternoon!
The children in Hub 1 had a wonderful afternoon exploring our new cabin space and the beautiful garden area outside!
We had great fun getting messy in the mud kitchen, mixing potions with sticks and listening to the wind blow and rustling through the trees! A lovely calm afternoon outside in the fresh air connecting with nature and providing an opportunity for some great balancing skills on the logs!
Inside the cabin we enjoyed making some paper faces and decorating them with eyes, ears, nose, mouth and hair, exploring different faces as part of our ‘Magical Me’ topic! A great opportunity for some fine motor skill practice and lots of vocabulary and communication/ talking points!
Foundation Stage and Eco Club have been busy cleaning, litter picking, weeding and planting this week in the F2 garden!
Maintaining the school grounds is hard work and is a never ending job! So it helps when there’s team work involved!
The children have loved exploring the plants already growing in the garden, particularly smelling the mint! And have some big plans and ideas for the future!
Here’s a few snaps of us getting our hands dirty this week…
What a wonderful morning F2 have had outside in our garden this morning!
Summer is nearly upon us as the weather has been glorious and the sunshine is beaming! We have noticed other signs of Summer as the flowers start to fully bloom and the trees become greener… we have loved observing and talking about the changes occurring in our F2 garden!
Today in the gentle wind it started to snow blossom as the pink petals floated and fell from the tree, we loved collecting the petals and counting how many we could spot!
We drew some amazing blossom trees using chalk exploring the colour pink and the different shades!
