Autumn has officially arrived on the rooftop, with a mix of glorious sunshine and drizzly rain that ensured our explorers got to enjoy the best of both worlds!
Fall Forgaging
Our foraging walks across the common gave us ample opportunity to find natural resources to take back to base camp and use for crafts! We managed to find conkers, pine cones, acorns, berries, leaves and feathers, with each child collecting their treasures in their own buckets or bags. With our handy identification sheets, the children managed to match the different fallen leaves with their photos and gleefully let us know every time they saw a matching leaf! When one of the children spotted a tree covered in red berries, we learned they were haw berry seeds from the hawthorn tree. With the high winds that we’ve been experiencing lately, there were more and more branches littering our walkways, which our children collected and used as brooms, sweeping any other debris out of the way for the rest of the general public. And of course, with rain comes puddles, which our explorers were delighted to splash around in! After figuring out that the wet mud could create hand prints, we had lots of fun gently patting each other on our rain coats so that we could see the prints, as well as on some blue roll we had left over!
Our explorers love discussing the natural items they find when foraging!
Natural Mobiles
The natural creativity didn’t stop there, as once we arrived back to base camp we used the natural materials we had collected to design a variety of items – mainly, our very own autumn mobiles! We carefully used a palm drill to create a hole in our conkers, and then threaded them through with colourful string. These were then attached to a long stick, and the process was repeated with feathers, leaves and pine cones adorning the mobile! With the excess leaves, we painted them and pressed them onto some paper, creating our own unique leaf prints to take home with us. After realising we had lots of sticks left over, the children created their own clay animals, giving them legs, arms, hair and even eyebrows with the twigs!
We love creating fun autumn art with the natural materials we find on the common!
Imagination Station
As ever, the mud kitchen and digging area has been overflowing with imagination. The children used the left over apples from last week to make some delicious apple pies, seasoned with our own grown herbs. The imagination continued to influence our free play as the children disappeared and became superheroes, saving the rooftop from evil one cape at a time! We created our very own little town to protect using wooden characters and left over brush from the common, with the children designing backstories for each person and the town itself drawn from their real life interactions.
The explorers enjoy collaborating to create small towns with fun imaginative backstories!
Once again, another fantastic week – we’ll see you next time!
