Hello families!
This week Forest School brought us another day packed full of learning, exploration and discovery. When our students arrived this morning, we were shocked to discover the difference in the landscape on our property from last week. It was amazing to see how high the Beaver River rose, but with the river taking away some of hiking paths, it gave us an opportunity to explore new areas.
Our topic this week was all about our local animals, we spent our morning playing games like “Ocelot tag” which was led by Emily, one of our fellow students. Some highlights of the day were making nests, continuing building our shelters and working towards starting fires without matches. We also brought out our collection of animal prints, and took time to learn 5 new footprints to add to our journals, as well as playing a footprint matching game to test our knowledge! Our big winner was Taven for getting 6 out of 9 correct.
While we explored the great outdoors, we tried to live like animals. Imagination play, and working on our imitation animal calls provided great opportunities for our students to have a good laugh. Some of us pretended to be beavers, dinosaurs, wolves, and sloths – and some even hugged trees! Our 3 epic games of “camouflage” was a great way to mimic animals hiding from their predator, and an awesome segway into our main lesson of learning, and teaching their fellow peers something new about their favorite animal. We dove right into our animal books, and found all we could about our furry, and not so furry little friends. Some of the animals we learned about were the Pig, Fox, Armadillo, Yellow Jacket, Wolf, Chickadee, Red headed Woodpecker and Coyote. Great job everyone for all your efforts in researching the animals you wanted to learn more about!
Our last fun activity of the day, in light of the holiday fast approaching, was to have an Easter egg Hunt! All were found except 2! Maybe well find them next week as a little treat!
We would like to send out a BIG thank-you for all the show and tells today – 4 in total! We had a cool branding piece brought in on some wood, wolf information books, flint & steel, and a super neat rock with crystals inside called a geode! We are SUPER lucky that we all love to share, and teach each other new things! Watching our students be so intrigued by the information each individual possesses is incredible! Each, and every one of our amazing Forest School kids teaches us something valuable, and interesting each day!
This week was full of support! 8 Respect and Love stickers, 5 wisdom stickers, along with 1 peer support bead.
Next week – We will going off property to explore more of the Bruce Trail! Get ready for some hiking!
Until next week!
Krista
