Dinosaur Trail, 24 July 2008

This week West Bank Park had some prehistoric visitors. They went into the woods, laid eggs, but forgot where! Luckily the Very Young Friends of West Bank Park were on hand to help. We all followed giant dinosaur footprints into the woods and collected eight different coloured eggs. The children (and adults!) enjoyed following the trail, searching the undergrowth when they saw a picture of a dinosaur, looking for the different colours and counting the eggs they collected. The dinosaurs were very grateful and rewarded us all with a certificate and cake. We await news of any hatchings!

After our snack we were full of energy and Rosemary taught us a French song with actions, 'Savez-vous planter les choux?' (Do you know how to plant cabbage?) and much fun was had trying to plant them with our hands, feet, nose and elbows!

Busy washerwomen (and men)

This week we set up a little laundry right in the middle of the woods. The children got to work with a pile of rags (sorry, beautiful clothes!), a basin, and some soap. Each piece had then to be thoroughly wrung out and hung up on the washing lines we suspended between trees. It was a pretty sight to see them so busy, and closer examination revealed:
* 3- and 4-year-olds really conscientiously scrubbing, wringing and pegging away
* 2-year-olds trying their level best to copy them, particularly working on their pegging technique (it is not at all easy you know!)
* 1-year-olds mixing mud in the water, stirring it with big sticks, and then deciding it was time to go and race up and down some tree mounds instead.

Then we all learnt a German song, 'Die Fleissige Waschfrauen' (the busy washerwomen) with actions - some excellent pronunciation.
If anyone has any pictures of the session, please do post them up.

We are very fragrant this week...

Last Thursday we had a brilliant time comparing all the roses in the Rose Walk and choosing the fallen petals from the ones we liked best, to make perfume (hands up who spent large swathes of their childhood making jars of this stuff and wondering why it went rancid in a few days). The children could hardly be torn away from the collecting job and we had vast quantities of petals to stir up in our bowl. Good thing too: one of the gardeners informed us that 'real' rose perfume uses 9000 petals per drop...
Stirring, sieving, and generally mashing the perfume was just as popular. Meanwhile other children were making more unusual fragrances from other herbs: sage, mint, lemon balm, blackcurrant leaves. Chopping and 'pestling and mortaring' these was hard work but entered into with gusto.
4-year-old Izzy had noticed a wonderful hidey-hole for storytime in the rose garden, so she led us there with the jingly bells, and we had the story of the traveller who taught the cross old woman how to make soup out of a nail. Song time was a bit cramped in there but it did not cramp our style!