Forest School Week 4

Forest School Week 4 

All Day and Afternoon Nursery

This week was all about birds, how to identify them and what they might eat. The children had some great ideas and felt comfortable sharing them. One of the things we discussed was that birds need to have a sharp eye to find their food. As the weather gets colder, the ground becomes harder making it difficult to find worms and the berries become more scarce. 

In order to understand how tricky it can be to find food, we played our bird food game which involved the children looking for wool 'wiggly worms'. When they found a worm, they brought it back to the 'nest' and matched it to the red, green or brown pile depending on the colour they'd found. At the end of the game we gathered around the 'nest' and noticed which colour was found the most and which colour was found the least. We found lots of red ones, some green but only one or two brown ones. The children thought about why this might be and we talked about how the brown ones in particular camouflage into their surroundings. 

During the session some children gathered on the 'bird world' tarp to read some special bird books and listen to the calls of the different birds. Others enjoyed looking after our soft toy birds, listening to their calls and making them nests. 

Others preferred to make repeating pattern bird feeders by threading apple, cheese and raisins onto a stick as a birdie kebab. We needed to be careful as we pushed the food on to make sure we didn't poke ourselves with the stick. Once they were finished we balanced them in the trees for the birds. It was quite tricky to find the perfect spot among the branches where our stick would balance the best but the children persevered and kept experimenting in different places.

The mallets were of great interest today too with children making stick houses for the birds flying overhead and the forest friends. We supported the children to use the tools safely and encouraged them to find strong small sticks to use. We also had our usual diggers who had lots of fun making delicious concoctions.