Undoubtedly the main attraction of this week has been the arrival of a beautifully made balancing game – ‘um jogo de equilibrio’ – hand-crafted by Filipe. The game consists of trying to balance different sized and shaped pieces of wood (all indigenous and locally sourced) on a larger wooden disc – which is suspended by rope from a lovely olive branch – without all the pieces sliding off the disc and falling into the tray below. Not only is it beautiful to look at, it is a really fun game that the children have been enjoying playing a lot since its arrival. Thank you Filipe from all of us at Folha Verde.
In our ‘chestnut’ group this week children were continuing to make their own calendars – getting familiar with numbers, days of the week and months. In ‘oak’ some of the older children tried out their first sample exam papers for the Portuguese exams that they will sit in the future.
Other activities this week included making bracelets from wool, learning about what happens to our food (the digestive system), children making their own little books from paper and card and playing with big cardboard boxes (we often noticed the strange site of boxes moving around the land with little pairs of legs sticking out at the bottom), and finally our first Folha Verde limbo extravaganza!
Folha Verde Jardim had to manage without Barbara for two days this week as she was off with a bad cold. Lucy did amazingly with support from Heather and Jules, making play-doh shapes with the children as well as lovely cards made from woven strips of paper. As smoothly as that all went, of course we were pleased to see Barbara back with us on Wednesday when she orchestrated Folha Verde Jardim’s first little play, with children acting out roles in different animal-related adventures.
On Wednesday children enjoyed an afternoon of outdoor free play, while Facilitators got to grips with the ongoing process of trying to make the best use of the space available in the Lagar – improving our storage space and moving chairs and tables around to cater for the expanding numbers of Folha Verde children. We also started to make some improvements to our cloakroom area which has been feeling a bit chaotic with the shoes, slippers, bags and coats of so many children in such a small corner of the building. We’ve made a new space for a separate Folha Verde Jardim cloakroom next to the existing one. Here’s to it being a bit easier to track down everyone’s belongings from now on!
That’s all for now – see you next week. x
