We’ve come back from the new year with all our new children settling in brilliantly and we’ve gone straight back to our routine of Forest School and group activities. As our parents know, we spilt the Burrow in the mornings and afternoons where one group will go out on Forest School and the other group will stay inside and have a group activity. Every child has a Forest School session and a group activity session.

This week in the Burrow the Forest School activity has been visiting the paddock where we have our assault course and (very muddy) mud hill. We’ve made our way out in to the paddock where we have had snack all together on the stools. Once we’ve munched through our snack we were able to start the physical stuff! Part of the EYFS talks about enabling environments, “Children learn and develop well in enabling environments, it offers support for children to take risks and explore”.

The assault course and mud hill allows our children to be independently taking risks of for example, the mud hill, whether they should climb their way up on their hands and knees, or use the rope or whether they should go back down sliding on their bums or walking down.

After we made it through the assault course and over the mud hill, we all enjoyed a good game of chase and hide and seek in and around the long grass in the paddock! We then made our way through the farm and the puddles to see all the animals along the way.

Our group activity has been colour matching, sorting and arranging.

We printed out some coloured paper of red, blue, yellow and green. I collected some objects from around the room of those colours, these varied from dinosaurs, numbers, bowls, forks, duplo and so on! I set the activity out on the carpet where we sat in a circle and went through the colours. I hide all the objects in my lap, I pulled one object out, for example, blue duplo and I put it on to the blue paper. I then went around the circle giving each child a different object and asking them “What colour does the dinosaur match?” or “what’s the same colour as the fork?”. Our children took this in their stride and began to help and communicate with each other for where to put the object. I also left the activity out on the carpet so it was accessible for everyone to look at or have a play with. It was lovely to see how many children stayed on the carpet and carried on with the activity by themselves.

Thanks for reading

Nicola