We are filled with gratitude for the wonderful welcome into the Wasaga Beach community from our new friends and families. Our day was filled with little moments that took us by surprise (literal surprise!.. aka spotted touch me not flowers), and big moments that brought us all together to build relationships.
We are very proud to say that all of our students have amazing Owl eyes (excellent vision) and identified plants and creatures that our teachers even missed. Our students were so eager to share their findings with their fellow peers and were constantly asking “I wonder” questions, which as educators we love as we want to keep those inquisitive minds pondering. We worked on mapping, tracking and our karate moves when we walked through unknown spider webs.
A lot of our students were new to this forested area, which made for lots of hiking and exploration. We were really looking to the ground for what Mother Nature had to offer and we were not disappointed. Some of the finding our student made were: Monarch Butterflies, Yellow Bears (Caterpillars), Huge Dragonflies, Inch worms, Tree Frogs, Fire Ants, Mushrooms, Ferns, Trees, oh and did we mention Millipedes? These friendly little fellas were abundant today showing us their legs, body and how they protect themselves. Our students were even lucky enough to have some firsts and felt what it was like to hold one. As one student said “it feels very ticklish and feels super cool”.
We want to thank you to all the students for coming into the Forest with us and exploring, wandering, playing and sharing their stories, we are very lucky to have spent our day with such awesome students.
Come back each week to see what we have been up to!
What an amazing day to welcome new and familiar faces back to Forest School, and our Chickadees didn’t waste anytime getting back into the swing of things. We had a busy morning filled with games, running, building, obstacle courses, a very talented band, and our returning students even helped with our morning fire!
Jumping into our core routines (opening circle, sit spots), our Chickadees were constantly practicing their Deer ears (excelling listening), Owl eyes (excellent vision) and Fox feet (being super sneaky). These skills were used while we found an abundance of small creatures only found by those who believe in the magic of the woods! Some of the smaller friends we found were Caterpillars, Spiders, Worms, Fire Ants, A Preying-mantis and Grass Hoppers (great job to all of those who caught one, and showing us that their pee stains your hands – But with a little hand sanitizer, cleaned right up!).
While bugs were the highlight of our day, mother nature provided moments for us to relax and learn about her other offerings, such as Plantain, Goldenrod and Walnut Seeds. Coming close to the end of our day we ended with an amazing and very skillful game of soccer.
We had a day full of laughing, adventure, exploring and first times, and we couldn’t have asked for a better group of chickadees to share our day with!
Thanks for stopping by,
Emily and Krista and the FNS Team.
Check out some pictures below to see how our day went!
We had a busy last couple weeks, but here’s a quick recap of all the fun!
Chickadees
These littler folks (Ages 4-5) have been up to a bunch of wild adventures over the past season. Don’t let their smaller size fool you, they hike forever and can be hard to keep with, even for the teachers! From mud kitchens, to epic forts in “the Fort” (our student-built sanctuary) to fairy hunts and bird watching, there’s no stop to all the fun. Of special note over the past couple weeks, the Chickadees tried out canoeing on the big pond! For some of them it was the first time ever and they rocked it. We caught frogs and turtles along the way, and had so much fun the first time, we did it all over again the following week! Our Friday group also had the chance to use the Imagination Station (loose parts) courtesy Healthy Kids Community Challenge – a bug thanks to them! And another special thanks to our Blue Heron (leader-in-training), Claire, who helped us out so much over the year!
Trading Blanket
Parents of older students have no doubt heard all about this year’s trading blanket! So many amazing and spectacular items were created and found for the end of the year’s tradition. We had spoons, bowls, baskets, skulls, fire kits, spears, sculptures, animal teeth, carver objects, bow and arrows, plants, lilac sugar, homemade creams, maple syrup, artwork and so much more. We were inspired by the creativity we saw, and our Thursday students even wrote a new song to commemorate the ceremony!
A moment to look back
As we wrapped up the year, we took some time to remember all the wonderful (and challenging!) things we did over the year. We did this by creating individual flags with pictures, words, timelines, maps and more on them. We shared our favourite memories and then used natural tie-dyes to make the flags even more colourful. In the end, they were hung on ropes in Mysterious Forest like prayer flags full of our group memories that will hang there and be weathered for long time to come.
Swimming!
It just wouldn’t be the week of Summer Solstice without our annual dip in the pond! Students braved the cool (and seaweedy!) waters to mark the occasion and had blast swimming, paddleboarding and jumping of the giant lily pad!
A moment of Gratitude
Finally, we just wanted to say a big old Thanks to you, our FNS community. We can’t do what we do without your support. Thanks for trusting us with your most valuable beings. We’ve seen a lot of growth over the past year – both in the students and ourselves too!
We are excited about the growth of our programming too. This year saw an expansion of programming, Snowy Owl Overnight trip, our new Meaford program, and much more! We look forward to new endeavours and adventures come the Fall (including our Wasaga Beach expansion at Blueberry Trails and our new Saplings program!)
We hope to see you over the Summer, but if not have a great one and spend as much time as you can outside, quieting your mind and listening for the birds.
Everything, absolutely everything, tastes better cooked over a fire. Period. End of sentence.
Over the past couple weeks we have put our groups’ culinary skills to work and created some delicious masterpieces.
In the outdoor world, learning to cook over a flame is a key skill to know when venturing into the wilderness. Moreover, it helps develop many important and highly transferable skills. It’s a creative outlet that practices reading and basic math (measuring). It’s following a plan and seeing a project through. It helps develop patience, improvisation and risk management (knives, fire). It gives an appreciation for real food and a sense of pride in one’s work. It’s also a needed life skill and helps build relationships with others. And most of all, it’s fun!
Most of our meals were made directly on a fire over the past couple weeks, but some were cooked over a camp stove (new skill!) and others were even cooked on a homemade stove made of tin cans. Here’s what our folks came up with:
Mac and Cheese
Boil water on a camp stove, and then add pasta, let it cook then add the rest! Simple and delicious.
4 cups of water
Salt
2 cups pasta
3-4 Tablespoons of margarine
1 cup of diced cheese
4 tbsp of powdered milk (or in our case powdered Mac and Cheese)
Soup (“Mac and Everything but Cheese Soup”)
Boil water over fire, chop and add harder veggies first, bouillon, then macaroni. Carve a spoon and stir. Voila!
Half pot of water
2 cups pasta
Veggies – any you want (we used carrots, potatoes, onion)
1 can of Chickpeas
Veggie Bouillon cubes (3-4)
Soup (“Onion and Bean – Don’t forget the bouillon!”)
Cooked on a homemade tin can stove! Boil water and add everything – stir)
Half pot of water
2 cups pasta
3 onions
Green Beans
Veggie Bouillon cubes (Don’t forget em like we did!)
Cheddar & chive scones
Mix flour and butter until it resembles bread crumbs. Add salt and milk, and mix into dough. Fold in chives and cheddar and place in greased cast iron pot, then cover with coals in the fire.
3 cups flour
1 cup buttermilk
Pinch of salt
1/4 cup chives
1/2 cup cheddar
1/4 cup butter
Apple CrisP
Slice and fry apples in a bit of butter. Add everything else and cook until soft!
½ cup oats
6 tbsp flour
3 tbsp brown sugar and ¼ cup sugar
Some cinnamon
2 tbsp butter
Mac apples
This week saw a drop in temperatures and the sights, smells, sounds and sense of Fall in the air. And with these changes there were a few other changes we discovered along the way. Not only were the plants seeming to wither, but there was a noticeable loss appeared in the animal kingdom too! Death was a subject that came up a few times this week – with a turtle funeral, a mysterious shrew discovery, a few fish and a frog. Sometimes, this can be tricky to navigate as these hands-on discoveries can be tough for some, while others approach with intense curiosity. As teachers, we see these as teachable moments in life-cycles, respect of nature and much more.
A quick Snapshot of the week
One particularly interesting story unfolded for our older groups on Thursday and Friday while out wandering… and no doubt if your child was part of those groups you’ve heard of the dead goose we stumbled upon. At first, this was a sad moment for some and a sense of empathy was evident – we had watched these birds all year swimming and playing in the pond. This discovery soon led to curiosity with this up close encounter… and a story began to unfold – what had happened here? It became a mystery to be uncovered! And suddenly we were overtaken by an obsession to figure it out.
We looked for clues – coyote, goose, duck, racoon and deer prints were all around. We followed them and tried to figure out where they went. We found feathers and scat to be identified everywhere! We got out our Field Guides and measured lengths and widths of everything, and looked up any potential ideas we had. Students set out their theories and added to them until we had several different, plausible and cohesive stories. And whether they were right or not, it doesn’t matter – it’s all about the process. Before leaving, they picked wild flowers, laid them down and said a few kind words about the bird.
Questioning and Tracking is one of our Core Routines (as well as Wandering and Using Field Guides in this case). Students are encouraged to ask questions about everything and we, in response, ask questions to them. They become detectives unraveling nature’s mysteries. This collaboration was fascinating for our students as it captured their imaginations.
Oh! We should also mention all of the fires that our students made with magnesium and steel; the pumpkins that were painted and decorated; the hikes we ventured on; the pears that were gathered and cooked on the fire; the “fairy seeking missions”; the epic animal style games of capture the flag; and so many more adventures that happened this week!
Cheers,
The Forest School Team
PS Thanks to all those who came out to our Open House Thursday night! We had a great time building community!
With the temperatures finally starting to settle down (well, except for Tuesday) it’s really starting to finally feel like Fall. We celebrated this week with our annual Fall Harvest, with a big focus on local food.
After spending time in our sit spots, we set out to explore our site early in the morning to harvest some sweet snacks from all over the land. We are lucky enough to have pear and apple trees scattered throughout our property which made for a great smoothie to add to our lunch. The cool thing about our smoothies? Totally made with the power of pedaling! Students jumped on the smoothie bike and each took turns blending not only our local fruit, but all sorts of other wild edibles we could find – red clover, chicory, mint and more. Oh! Of course there was also our favourite addition across the board: the wild grapes that turned our smoothie a bit sour and really purple!
After some afternoon unstructured play which took all sorts of forms – from baseball to slacklining, dragon tails to loose parts, music to obstacle courses, (it truly is wonderful watching the ideas and imaginations unfold!) – we did a storybook walk to Stone Soup by J.J. Muth. It’s a wonderful story – read it here if you’d like! This story inspired us to create our soup. We found stones, added salt, chopped and added veggies and had a communal meal. Everyone played a role and a special thanks to all those brought in a garden veggie.
Depending on where interests went, we also had students dehydrating pears and apples, creating solar ovens to bake cinnamon apples and pears, and we even preserved some pears on Friday!
All in all, a yummy week.
An incredibly big thanks to Healthy Kids Community Challenge for lending us their Smoothie bike and Story Walk! They’ve got so many cool things happening and are making a huge difference in our community! Check them out here.
Next Week: Field Trip: Disc Golf for the older students, Pond Study for the younger ones.
We’d like to extend a HUGE welcome to our new students and families and a welcome back to our returning students! We had a good start to our first week at Forest School and luckily, though it called for rain, we seemed to miss the worst of it!
This week we focused on getting to know each other, community-building and becoming acquainted with a small portion of the property. We began the day as usual with a smudge, morning circle and other core routines. We also engaged in some get-to-know you activities, such as designing our own personal flag to highlight our favourite activities and passions. We will hang this in our classroom for the semester.
Students eagerly picked out theirsit spots and began creating and imagining all the things they intend to build/do/create there. Some were content to just be and absorb the changes that Mother Natures will bring. We spent some quiet time reflecting in our spots and came to a consensus: there is a lot of noise in silence. Blue Jays, crickets and wind in the leaves just to name a few! We found ourselves immersed in our surrounding. We all came away loving our own sit spot experience… and eager to return next week!
The students jumped at the chance for some exploratory time, where imaginations, teamwork and good old fashioned outdoor fun came alive. The afternoon brought our first bonfire of the year, where we added the ashes from the final community fire of last year and made some thoughtful goals for this year of new challenges, budding friendships, and pushing comfort zones. In anticipation for next week, where some might want to try earning their fire bead, we spent some time learning the basics of fire-building (even in the rain!) and how to use fire respectfully. It was a great start to building our new community.
Speaking of beads, we’ve got a whole bunch of new ones this year, as well as some classics – click here for the list! Don’t know what beads are yet? Check out our core routines page. There are even some that can be done at home. Along with this, we made our medallions to store our beads on. On one side, children wrote their names, and the other they drew or wrote their spirit/favourite animal or plant. This also gave students the chance to use tools for the first time this year by hand drilling their own holes!
Next Week:
Survival Skills – fires, shelters and more!
We also still have a few spaces available! If you know anyone that may be interested please share with them. Thanks!
That’s all for now, we look forward to the semester and exploring alongside everyone!
Happy Solstice! After our core routines this week and a brainstorm on teamwork, our days differed immensely in what student-interests led us to. We book-ended all days with sage and sit spots in the morning, and a fire at the end, but otherwise they were so unique, let’s sum them up separately.
TUESDAY
We had some eager helpers on Tuesday and started off by weeding the garden and planting some tomato plants in anticipation of our Fall Harvest next school year. The majority of our day was spent “farming” and building gardens in our sit spots, developing clay factories (which turned into clay all over the place!), and harvesting wild edibles to eat in a salad. Some lucky adventurers even gathered some wild strawberries!
Students also built a brand new fire pit, complete with rock ring which we used for our end of the day fire. Despite the rain (or maybe because of?…), we still had a great time. After a game of Capture the Flag, we even had time to hang our homemade bat house SW facing high in Willow Tree… we’ll see if anything moves in!
(PS – since we were on a camp trip, we didn’t have time to put up photos for Tuesday’s canoeing last week, so if you scroll to the very bottom, you’ll find some there.)
Wednesday
Our Wednesday class dove into what they love best – catching aquatic creatures and manipulating the movement of water with waterfalls, rapids and dug out riverbeds. Everyone had a job in this project – digger, dammer, dumper and more. And what a lucky day we had with the discovery of many 4+ leaf clovers!!!
We headed out to our sit spots, and student-interest kept us there for most of the morning. Like Tuesday, we saw students dive into the clay market (quite literally!) and create a whole bunch of infrastructure and objectives. Others could be found trying their luck at fishing (no bites this time), collecting ample amounts of wild strawberries, transplanting wild edibles into their personal gardens, and carving cutlery from wood.
Another reoccurring theme throughout the day was ants and their colonies and nests. We had a lengthy and great debate about whether or not to capture some ants and create our own ants in a jar – and in the end, everyone agreed that we should leave these fellas be. Later in the day the students even created an epic ant home (or mansion) and the Painted Turtle group sit spot! And speaking of which, this area had quite the facelift with everyone pitching in to create a new reading circle with stumps and boards, and cleaning all the garbage along the way.
A big thanks to our volunteer parent, Jamila, who lent some helping hands of her own today!
Thursday
The pond, as usual, was a huge hit on Thursday and we were able to identify new species of critters that lurked under the leaves. After our check-ins (and by popular demand) we played some team games including our favourite, Survival, where students learned that it’s not just humans who work together and lend a helping hand. Afterwards (when the rain came briefly), we laid out and drew up plans for a future “Nature” playground that we want to develop at the site! Students came up with some really practical, feasible and awesome ideas! We hope to put some of them in place in the near future.
Before embarking on our afternoon, we held an impromptu funeral for “Max” the toad, a poor fella we came across today. This was topped off with a great rendition of Mary Had a Little Lamb on the the recorder, played by one of our students. Throughout the day we visited some new places, including the reading circle created by Wed’s group and the fire pit created by Tues’ group, where student’s created their very own imaginative stories to share with each other around the fire.
Alas, some sad news – we say goodbye to Krista this week as she won’t be here next week! A HUGE THANKS for all you do for the students and the program!
Congrats to our Beads Recipients: 2 Tracking beads, a handful of Sit Spot bead, 2 Colouring beads, 2 Curiosity bead, 2 Music beads, 3 Littlerless Lunch beads, and 4 storytelling beads!
Next Week: Hard to believe it’s the last day of the year! We’d like to invite all families to our final wrap-up at 3:15 pm at Bygone Days. It will take about 20 minutes.
This week at Forest School we wanted to take our kids off the property and explore some of the Bruce Trail that is located right in our own “backyard”. Words could not express how much fun we had today exploring a new part of the Bruce Trail, some of our hiking goals were to discover “Standing Rock” and find the newly renovated “Frank’s Lime Kiln”. Let the adventure begin!
Before we headed out on our journey, we took a slight detour to “Fossil Mountain” to take time to uncover some fossils by peeling apart layers of shale rock. The discoveries made were amazing! Our students got their hands dirty and found different types of rock, fossils, shells, seeds and ice.
Our first trek started at the Nottawasaga Lookout, located just outside of Duntroon. The “Standing Rock” trail is a 1.2 km side loop that encompasses flat and rocky terrain, including caves and crevasses. Bravery and Leadership beads were earned all throughout our afternoon escapade. Our kids ducked, crawled and slid down 5 ice slides, it gave them an easy head start for the rest of our hike! Before we headed back to school, we wanted to let the kids explore a 150-year-old kiln. This kiln had been built in 1860 and was restored in 2015 – the outcome is beautiful. The kids also had a great time learning a little bit about our local pioneer history.
It was great to see our class being so cohesive through out the caves. Our comfort zones were tested, and challenge-by-choice was presented. Moving slowly, and communicating was top notch today! We also worked towards leadership, peer support, spotting, encouraging one another and trust. We are so proud of everyone, you all worked so hard.
Beads and Stickers were abundant today! 8 Bravery Beads, 1Show and Tell Bead, 1 Travel Bead, 1 Leadership Bead, 2 Peer Support, 1 Curiosity Bead and 1 Nature Lover Bead. As usual love, respect and wisdom stickers were earned as well.
Next Week – This will be our last class for the Winter semester, can you believe it!? We will be doing a recap of everything we have learned over the semester, with lots of laughs, fun, and games. We are excited for the spring semester to start and to meet all the new faces!
In the spirit of March Break we decided to skip out on school this week and head off to Wasaga Beach to discover new parts of our community. We started our adventure at the Nordic Centre in hopes of exploring some new trail systems and after a quick tree ID tag game we were off!
While on the hike, Tuesday’s group made an unanticipated discovery – a HUGE amount of ice among the trees and under the snow from the previous melt. They spent a good chunk of time clearing it off (some students even became official “Zambonis”), creating their own bases and then connecting this intricate network of rooms together. During a debrief/apple cider break, we found out that teamwork and cooperation were the biggest factors in creating this enormous project. (Ahh, emergent learning :)!)
Our Zamboni!
Wednesday we had a chance to swing by the Library before heading to Wasaga to check out some of the cool activities they had going on during March Break and buy some books for our Little Free Library. After we arrived at the Nordic Centre though, imaginations took over and it seemed that as soon as we began our hike we had already stopped to investigate something further. This time instead of ice, it was a giant tree that had fallen over with an exposed root system over 6 ft high. The students quickly got to work on their “archaeological” dig with “hammers” in hand, and sorted out different roles for everyone as they uncovered what lay beneath. We as teachers sat back and watched this magic happen, and eventually this led to a discussion around soil types (with a first hand look at how sandy the soil is in Wasaga) and new life from old. (Again, a big shout out to emergent learning!).
Our “archeological” dig
After a picnic lunch, we played a quick game of Eagle’s Eye and then headed off to the Wasaga Beach Free Spirit site, aka the soon-to-be home of our Little Free Library! While there, we made a a fire together, told stories and ate marshmallows – or rather marsh-ball-ows on Tuesday as they had all melted together in the bag. We took a quick peak at the Nottawasaga river in anticipation of paddling it in the spring, and then had to head back to the school house. Time flies when you are having fun!
A big thanks to those who brought in some books for our Little Free Library project! It’s almost full now!
Next Week:
We have another field trip! We’ll be heading to Singhampton to check out the cave systems there.
