Hello all!
What an amazing first day for Thornbury Forest School! A huge welcome to all our new students at this beautiful location! Within this blog I will be writing each week about our group and self discovery, our field trips, adventures, and daily activities. I am very excited mentor our students at the Heathcote branch, and to assist our students in self discovery within nature! Check out our pictures below!
This week was our Introduction into forest school within our property, surroundings, and fun games with all students. We started off by playing games on our natural jungle gym with a Tarzan swing, climbing holds that follow up a fallen Willow tree. We then started the day off by painting our nature medallions, and participated in a sumdgeing ceremony (white sage) that our students we will participate in each week. This ceremony starts the students off with a positive outlook of the day while the sage washes away our negative energy.
Our students then learned about our Bead Ceremony and our sticker chart (the 7 Grandfather Teachings). We hand out stickers each week to promote healthy and positive behaviour, and something for our students to work towards. Our Bead Ceremony is a guide where students can work towards a skill, while working with others or by themselves.
Before lunch we went for a hike in Heathcote Park. This is were our students curiosity took off when we found tons of snails, apple trees, milkweed, shells from the Beaver River, a HUGE praying mantis, a tire swing, and lots of places to build shelters! We will definitely be back!
After lunch our students got hire swimsuits and life jackets on and we went down to the Beaver river, were we aimed to catch and discover water life. We made sure we took our journals with us and recorded what we found and saw. Minos, shells, leaches, crawfish, and played for hours with clay. Our students worked together, had discussions, created games, became leaders, and respected each other around the water.At the end of our day, and our snack the students went on a frog hunt, while others started decorating our wooden teepee with fallen willow bark.
We had a great first day and are excited to continue to grow as a community with each other! Next week we will be diving into our Leave No Trace principles.
Thanks for stopping in!
Krista
