Little Wildlings

Happy New Year!

We’ve had a lovely start to the new year here with some boxes from Hygge Boxed

The children found these really engaging and it was great to see them making faces and animals with the wood slices and all the natural resources!

The boxes made it really easy to bring a bit of hygge to our setting ☺️

It’s been a brilliant start to Autumn here 🍂

We’ve painted some spiders, decorated our own telescopes and went spider spotting 🕷

We made our own playdoh hedgehogs with spaghetti spikes 🦔
When we were finished we squished it all back down and rolled it out to print leaves 🍁

We’ve even had a birthday 🥳

We haven't posted for ages, so sharing a few of the things we've been up to over Summer.

🌳 drawing in the woods
💦 Water painting
🌸 Making blossom trees using hand painting.
🐦making sure our birds had plenty of food
⭐ Making Salt dough decorations
🌍 Exploring the Festival of Earth in Wakefield
🌻 Sunflower picking

To name just a few things.

We've been celebrating the Olympics this week.

🏅We have had some Olympic ring themed colour matching.
🏅Competed in our own little games, with a tin can alley, football goal scoring, bean bag balance races.
🏅Read Gold Medal Me.
🏅Painting using cups to make Olympic ring inspired pictures.
🏅Designed our own medals.

New outdoor toys for this week.

Giant chalks and a water wall made from recycled materials. 🖍️💦

This is why you will quite often find everyone here barefoot including Sam & Franki. 👣

The benefits of being barefoot are huge, and not just so they develop natural shaped feet but for lots of other reasons too, such as sensory development and fine motor development in the feet.

“At the age of 10-12 months when a child begins to walk, the bones of the foot are only partially ossified, are in reality but an orderly arrangement of cartilaginous masses.” - Functional Disorders of the Foot by Frank D. Dickinson, MD 🦶🏽

The implications of this are that little feet are extremely malleable, and will adapt to whatever environment they are put in. We want our children to grow up with natural shaped feet, not shoe-shaped feet. Keep those little paws out of shoes as long as possible. 🐾

📸 .plasencia 🌀

🪶🌿 Painting with Nature 🌿🪶

Today we used the things we collected in the woods yesterday to do some painting.

Mark making doesn't always have to be done using traditional things like pencils and paintbrushes.

🌿🌳 Exploring 🌳🌿

This is what we love to do best. We went to the woods on Monday and just explored with the little ones.

We followed their curiosity and interest and just watched what happened.

🦢🦆 We fed the ducks and swans and saw a beautiful cygnet.

💦 We jumped in lots of puddles.

🌿 We found some fallen trees and explored under the canopy of leaves and then collected some as the trees were going to die anyway so we explained that meant we could pull some off the tree.

🪶 We collected feathers.

💦 We found a stream with a make shift bridge and spent ages crossing it and watching the water. Then we found another tiny stream with a little waterfall which they all tried to climb.

🐿️ We found some very friendly squirrels who wanted to see what we were having as a snack.

📏 We measured lots of things we found as one of the Wildlings loves her tape measure at the minute.

💦 We used nature to clean our hands after digging in the dirt with sticks.

🌳 We used the big trees for a game of hide n seek.

🍊🍋

We wrapped up fruit week with some sensory play.

Our Friday little wildlings love water play so we stuck some lemon, lime and orange slices in the tuff tray with some water for them to explore.

Straight away the shoes came off and trousers were rolled up so they could paddle.

One of the wildlings had a taste of the slices before they went into the water, showing a strong preference for the lemon slices.

We also tried another fruit at lunch, pomegranate but nobody was brave enough to eat any of the seeds.

🍇🫐🍏 Fruit Week 🍌🍊🍓

We kicked of this week with some colouring in and shape matching using fruit pictures. One of our Wildlings loves shapes so this was to tie in his interest.

We talked lots about different fruit and labelled as many as we knew, turns out a lot.

Then we went out shopping for fruit. The kids helped choose the fruit, pay for it and pack it into the bags to bring home. We bought a LOT! 🙈

We've had a big fruit salad platter with our lunch today and did some more labelling of fruits. Lots of the kids tasted new fruit for the first time and they all were very interested in the fruit, even the bits the didn't dare to try. 🍍🍒🥝

We then smashed open a coconut to taste and drink the water inside. 🥥 Only one Wildling braved the coconut though.

We have more fruit to taste later on this week as well.

Finished off the week with rainbow foam today. 🏳️‍🌈

It was very messy, but lots of fun and then turned into water play as we followed the kids interest.

It’s Pride month 🌈

To celebrate we have made pride rainbow flags, rainbow pictures, done a rainbow hunt and even included the smallest Wildlings with bright rainbow toys!

We used cardboard people to talk about how different families can look, this was a lovely discussion with the older ones who talked about some of their friends who have two daddies 🌈

We are taking part in and here are a few of the things we've done so far.

🍏 We had a picnic under a big tree.

🐿️ Spotted a wild mammal - we saw a squirrel on our trip to the park.

🌱 Felt the wild between our toes - we are always barefoot here, but we made a special effort and did a barefoot Sensory Walk.

🌼 Thread a daisy chain - the little ones couldn't quite manage this but we picked some on one of our walks.

☁️ Look at the clouds

🍄 Find mini wildness - we spotted some tiny flowers growing between the pavement.

🐞 Find a creepy crawly - again this is something we do nearly every day.

Happy Father's Day!

We can now finally share what our little ones made to take home to their Dad's last week.

They were all so good as well and hardly ate any of it in the process.

🌿 Herb Week 🌿

We've been exploring herbs this week and set up a potion making area for the kids to explore lots of different herbs, both dry and fresh.

They loved smelling the different herbs and picking which they liked the best.

But mostly the just enjoyed making a mess making their potions.

☔Rain Week☔

It was supposed to rain ALL week but then we planned rain week and it seemed to keep it at bay.

Nevertheless we persevered with our theme for the week.

🌧️ We had a rain themed sensory tray.
☔ We played in the garden in the rain.
🌧️ Painted pictures of rain.
☔ We used the mud the rain made to paint outside.
🌧️And we played in the garden without our shoes on to feel the wetness left over from the rain under our feet.