Free Spirit Forest and Nature School

Nurturing Connection with Self, Others and Nature

Fire Keepers and Rainfall Warnings

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Hey Folks,

Firstly, a BIG welcome to our new students and their families this semester – Forest School is booming and we are so happy to have a growing community. Also, a BIG welcome back to our students from the Fall, and of course our courageous Winter semester crew! We’re in for a good season this Spring.

We started off our days learning how to set up tents (which were especially needed on Tues and Thurs with the rainy weather!) then continued like most days at Forest School – Free Play, Smudge and Check-ins. Afterwards we ventured off for an extended amount of time in our Sit Spots (if you don’t know what this is yet, follow this link to our Core Routines page). New students were on the hunt for a space to call their own and become stewards of for the next few months, while returning students added their personal touches to theirs: a new balance beam in one, a shelter in another, a wall in one more – anything to make it their own… even some fairy gardens! The students could’ve (and would’ve!) spent all day there.

Hanging out in our sit spots

Over the past few weeks, the classes have really been putting in time at our fire pit. We now have an incredible tree fort, a natural shelter, a storefront and a revitalized fire ring. As our goal this week was to learn new outdoor skills, what better place to spend most of the day? Our goal? To create a fire without a match or lighter.

On Tuesday, after a Fire Safety lesson, students eagerly got busy with different jobs – collecting wood, getting the fire ready, fetching water, making “nests” and setting up our ignition station. Students then jumped at the chance to try out our magnesium and steel. With charcloth in place and a nest nearby, we were ready to go. And we did it!!! Our very first “fire keeper” is a long-time Painted Turtle, the very first student in FS Forest School History to make a fire without a match… and he did it in the rain!

Magnesium and steel with charcloth

Wednesday was much the same, though we had much better weather and even more students were able to get their nests blazing without a match. Alas, we tried our best with the Bow Drill and came up just shy – at least we have a new goal for later in the spring (flint and steel proved quite difficult as well, but just another thing to look forward to!).

Working on our Bow Drill skills

The afternoon was spent in different ways on these two days. After exploratory play time, most student wanted to spend more time in their sit spots, or showing them off to others. We found out that tree sap (this was from a pine) can act like a torch and burn really well and long on the end of a stick. We also opened up the knife throwing pit on Wednesday for the Snowy Owls, which was a ton of (highly supervised!) fun. To finish off the day, the classes learned about the key components of a camp stove, how it’s put together and how to use it. And we made some cider/tea.

Our knife throwing pit

Thursday saw some of the craziest weather to date at Forest School. This put a kink in our fire plans, but not in our spirits! After an epic hike to Maple Forest, with some inevitable stops along the way (including finding 5 FROGS!), we were soaked and muddy! The students did a great job at keeping warm and layering up, so we made a fire, had some tea and roasted some marshmallows to celebrate our resilience. What unreal winter-like weather, and a great reminder that “April Showers” can be brutal – please remember to send extra clothes with you child or you can leave a labelled set at the school.

2 of the bigger frogs we found

The classes also brainstormed, voted on and came up with 3 new beads (one per class). Allow us to introduce the student-created:

Sit Spot Bead – earned by taking good care of your sit spot, spending quiet time reflecting in it, doing assigned tasks and making it your own.
Fisherperson Bead – earned by demonstrating new knowledge with fishing… bonus if you catch a fish.
Explorer Bead – earned by exploring somewhere new and stepping outside of your comfort zone.

And by popular demand from all three classes: Fire Keeper – creating and maintaining a fire without a match or lighter. (We have a few to give out next week!)

We will send home a fully updated bead list next week. Congrats to our bead recipients this week! 2 Fire beads, 1 teaching bead for a great lesson on Great White Sharks, and 1 Show and Tell bead.

Next Week:
All about animals!

Cheers,

Kim, Krista and Matt

More Photos:

Good-bye Winter, Hello Spring

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Hey Friends!

This week at Forest School we spent our last day of Winter semester building shelters for our community, student led games and reflecting on our time spent with each other. A little fun was also spent around the fire-creating banana boats. Another epic day!

Our morning was spent discovering animals and natural objects around our fishpond, which naturally led into building chipmunk’s and fairy shelters. We then shifted our focus onto shelters for our school. Teamwork, communication and imagination were a huge part of this project. With the use of natural and man made objects our students created the start of their ultimate tree fort!

We also spent some time playing games that our students created, our kids have some amazing imagination!

Ancient Egypt Mummy Attack

Which consisted of two mummy’s and 5 relics.

Sunflower (gave life)
Painted rock (super strength)
Medallion (unlocks secrets)
Bandana (power to see the unseen)
Block with numbers (code)

The goal of the game is to find all the relics and get them to the safe zone before getting caught by the mummy’s.

Dead ants – All ants have to run to different safe zones without getting caught by the anteater.

A few other games were obstacle course and pass the barrier game.

These are awesome games and definitely will be played again!

To finish off our day we took some time to relax and reflected on our time at Forest School. We shared our favourite memories, skills we have gained and beads we have accomplished. Finishing off with report cards and our Winter semester video, which you can watch below.

Thank-you to all the students and parents for being apart of our FIRST Winter semester. All out students came to school ready for an adventure with lots of layers, snacks and happy faces! We had so much fun this semester and looking forward to Spring. Thank-you for taking this adventure with us!

Next Week – Our first day of Spring! Outdoor Skills and Thrills.

Until next week!!

Krista and Neal

Our Video

Celebrate Good Times

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Hey Everyone!

We celebrated the end of our semester with a little “spring cleaning” this week and spent some time outfitting our sit spots, exploring the “concrete factory” and updating the amenities at our camp sites. Naturally, students incorporated some slack lining and tree climbing too!

Over both days, it was awesome to watch creativity bloom. Tuesday we visited an area of our property known as the concrete factory – essentially a muddy and sandy area with a small amount of running groundwater. It was soon discovered that this mix turned into “quicksand” and suddenly students were stuck!! After a rescue mission, it was decided we should barricade this area off to warn other students, so we quickly made a fence from the down branches and grass (for cord) in the area.

While this was going on, other students were searching, opening and discovering hundreds of fossils. Everyone was on the hunt for Trilobytes and worked together to pry the rocks open at their “excavating store”. Even more students were damming up the flowing river and adding pipes and tunnels to direct it. It sure was a busy morning!

On Wednesday, we shifted focus to our campsite and soon enough a market was open, trading in bricks, tree bows, sticks and more. Eventually we had an entirely new shelter built, a (well-supervised!) knife throwing pit using homemade throwing knives one of our students created from old saw blades, and entirely new sit spots for some Snowy Owls.

After lunch on both days, we played our favourite game – Survival. Students became part of the food chain and had to survive for 30 minutes finding food, shelter and water. We are happy to report that everyone from both days survived – and we’ve never seen a more friendly and cooperative carnivore!

To finish off the day we had a bonfire and cooked some bannock. We shared our favourite memories from the Winter and appreciations for each other. Afterwards, we gave out report cards and watched our Forest School Winter Movies (which you can see below).

Lastly, a big appreciation for you – the parents!! Winter can be a tough time of year, but with your dedication, commitment and awesome layering work, we had a really successful semester! Thanks for taking part in this journey with us.

Next Week:
Spring Semester begins – Outdoor Skills and Thrills!

Cheers,

Matt and Kim

Videos:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

More Pictures:

Our big builders, in little bodies

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Hi Friends!

The rain didn’t have us singing the blues today! Our busy little beavers were focused on tools, projects and problem solving. We were lucky to have one last week with warmer temperatures which gave us a lot of flexibility in our active play.

It’s been really incredible watching the growth and development in each child with their motor skills, confidence and teamwork…way to go everyone!

There was a ton of enthusiasm, laughter and fun this week! Here’s a “behind the scenes” look at all of our highlights and accomplishments of the day!

We started the day off by using our muscles and jumped into tearing down our shelters we made last week then built new ones. Last week fire was a big hit so our students wanted to take some time and work together and start a group fire. We learned very quickly that starting a fire is not as easy as it sounds. After all their hard work our fire was started and stayed hot until lunch time.

A big thanks to Emily for bringing in her rock/crystal collection. All the kids got to take a look at “golden tigers eye”, ” black lava stone”, “agate stone”, “rose quartz” and “fools gold”.

Everyone showed off their hammering skills with real hammers and nails! Every child went home with all ten fingers intact!

Later in the afternoon our students spent some time creating music with our homemade kazoos. Also, we apologize for the crazy weather today, we were on a roll with our creativity and made our very own rainmakers!

Our sit spots are a time where our students can reflect on their day and today was no exception. Our question of the day was – “Give 5 examples of how we treat people and how you want to be treated.” Some of the amazing answers were – “be kind, be respectful, help each other, love, like, hold someones hand, give people flowers when they are not happy, tell jokes and make someone smile.” Needless to say we have some seriously amazing little humans on our hands! Way to go parents for raising these sweet, genuine children that we get the pleasure of spending time with once a week.

We always save the best for last!! The main focus today was designing and building their very own bird houses! It was amazing to see how different all of our designs were.

Alice yelled from the Garden ” I heard a Wolf call!!” That’s all it took for our kids to run down to the Beaver River howling for coyotes with the hope of finding a wolf! Good news is no other animals called back!

To no surprise, there were lots of “Honesty” and “Respect” stickers earned today as well as:

1. Storytelling bead. Congratulations to everyone, you all worked so hard for them.

Next Week: We will be joining Collingwood Forest School for a BIG hike up to Loree Forest! Make sure to have an energizing breakfast to keep you fired up, and ready to explore!

Thanks for checking in this week!

Krista

Bonus Picture Below

Taven found a Banana Slug in our Bug hotel today!

Build me a fire and I will make you a s’more!

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What another beautiful day we had this week at Forest School! This week our focus was all about fire. And what a fire packed day we had!

Some of our activities included visiting the Town of Blue Mountains Fire Station and discussing fire basics. Then with high anticipation our students had the chance to BUILD and LIGHT their own fires. Yes! You read that right. It was a great day for productive play, imagination and skill building.

Check out our photos below and you’ll see everything we did in just one day!

After observing our worms for two weeks we decided to release them into our compost area and our bug hotels.

In the morning we thought we would mix it up and say what we are thankful for during our smudging ceremony.

Freeplay is an activity that happens throughout our days and today we found a bunch of hunters trying to catch a dangerous Jaguar. Oh yeah, not everyone wanted to capture this animal. There were some who wanted to protect her. But not to worry…no animals were harmed.

Sit spots are moments where we reflect on our day. All aspects are covered from what we have learned, how things made us feel or just writing down our favourite part of the day. It is when the students take time for themselves while giving thanks to nature.

Thank you to the Fire Chief Prevention Officer Duncan Rydall for showing us around Station #1 today. We got to see and learn all about the trucks (the kids even got to sit in them). There were lots of questions answered and we shared our fire safety rules. What a great experience!

What are we holding in our hands you ask? Our kids started their fire knowledge by understanding what a fire needs to survive (heat, fuel and oxygen) along with different types of fuel (tinder, kindling and logs). It was then time to create our fire bundles that will help start our fires!

It was a great experience for our kids to light their fires with matches, lighters, flint and steel. Comfort zones were challenged today and now when it comes to fire we have braver students!

This task was challenging for some of our students. Creating a fire and lighting them was harder for some students but taught us great lessons. We learned what not to do, what natural material to use, where to build a fire, what we would do differently and what things we would keep the same. This is a skill we are going to build upon on a weekly basis.

Congratulations to our students who received the fire bead (3 in total), and 7 well deserved wisdom stickers!

NEXT WEEK: FIELD TRIP– We will exploring the natural rock formations of Metcalf Rock!

Things your child will need – extra clothes, winter hat and warm gloves.

Things we will provide – helmet, headlamp and harness.

Thanks for stopping by,

Krista

Bonus picture! Check out this worm.

And we’re off!

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Hey Folks!

A big welcome to all our new students this year and a big welcome back to all our Forest School returners! Every week, we’ll be posting a summary and photos here of all the adventures our Snowy Owls and Painted Turtles get up to. It is our hope to try and capture all those moments of exploration, learning and good old fashioned fun on here to share with you.

We (Kim and Matt) are privileged to be the Tuesday and Wednesday teachers for the Collingwood branch of Free Spirit Forest School. Although we have a basic outline we follow each day, one of the greatest things about emergent learning is we never know where it is going to take us. And thus you will certainly read about slight variations in our days.

This week our focus was on getting to know our school house, the land we are using, our learning community and our daily routines. After creating our nature medallions, we started our day off like we will every week with the students participating in a smudging ceremony using white sage. We do this to honour the cultural history of the area as well as cleanse ourselves of negativity in order to set the tone for the day.

After some community building, the students were then introduced to some of the tools that we use including our sticker charts (which are tied to the Seven Grandfather Teachings) and our Bead Ceremony. The Bead Ceremony is an ongoing project where students will earn beads for various hard, soft and creative skills that learn. For more information on specific beads, please click here.

Just before lunch, we headed out on a hike around a portion of the property to get to know it better. The students brought along their journals a mapped out the village and the surrounding area. We have a giant group map that we are creating together with all the special places we discover along the way.

After lunch, we headed out to choose our sit spots and spend some alone time in nature. These spots will play an important part throughout the year at Forest School as we will be visiting them weekly with different activities to do. We followed this up with the extreme race course – crawling through tubes, balancing on beams, army crawling under a fence, then hopping over walls – and all in under 30 seconds!

Throughout the day, we had some great moments of curiosity and exploration, too. From our students ripping up old diseased tomato plants to save the others; to climbing trees, catching frogs and naming swans; from sweltering heat, to running around in the pouring rain; from sharing legends and stories, to slurping down watermelon and spitting the seeds out as far we could. We had a blast and are looking forward to the upcoming semester!

We have a great group of kids this year and are excited to see where it will take us. We are always open to suggestions and want you to be involved as much as possible. Please let us know if you have any ideas or resources we can use to enhance your child’s learning.

That’s all for this week, check out the photos below! Next week we’ll be diving into Leave No Trace ethics.

Thanks,

Matt and Kim

Learning Blocks and Compasses

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Hey Folks,

Another fun-filled week of productive play and learning at Forest School, with a special contribution from Collingwood’s Healthy Kids Community Challenge who brought us their mobile Imagination Playground. We spent a solid portion of our day working collaboratively using the block-based system to build, smash and recreate various castles, towers, bird’s eye views of small villages, buildings, cars, waterfalls – you name it! Your children unleashed their creativity to manipulate the foam blocks and noodles to modify existing target games – like baseball, horseshoe and other tossing games. They collectively built a large creative structure for lunch (with a moat all around us too one day). They met our team building “bobsled initiative” by working together to move a ball across the field using the “pipes”. And they enjoyed the social aspect of hands-on productive playtime. Keep your eyes open in parks and green spaces near your neighbourhood as the HKCC has dates booked in June to visit local parks with their mobile playground to encourage fun, active play outside – and it’s FREE! For more information, check them out here.

More exciting news for Forest School: Thanks to Free Spirit Gardens, we now have our very own raised veggie bed! We drew on our previous knowledge about species competition, plant needs and wants, and appropriate spacing. We measured, marked and planted multiple tomato and pepper seedlings! It was fun getting our hands dirty to grow our own food!

In the afternoon, we spent our day learning about all things related to maps and orienteering – Cardinal Directions, parts of a compass, how to travel. Using various hard copies of maps, we identified key components of maps (title, legend, directions, scale), then updated our Snowy Owl and Red Tail map of the property. Shortly after (on Wednesday), we ventured to our sit spots to create a bird’s eye map of their own area (Thursday they made classroom maps due to weather). If your child is asking for a needle, cork, and magnet, they are likely referring to the craft we made today to demonstrate how magnetic North works. Did you know you can make your own?

To earn our new Travel Bead (white), students were required to successfully navigate an orienteering course created on the property – all students were able to independently travel between points using their newly honed compass skills! Quite impressive! This hard skill will be of extra importance as we approach our culminating activity for our final day at Forest School (last week of June).

In addition to the Travel Beads earned this week, two students earned their Peer Support Bead – a very special bead designed to represent the consistent awareness and curiosity of others, empathy, and general support of one another through meaningful friendship and play! A very significant bead at Forest School. Congratulations!

As weather continues to warm up, a friendly reminder to bring lots of water, a sun hat, sunscreen – and even a change of clothes, swimsuit and a towel! We will soon be selling Forest School T-Shirts for those who are interested! ($10.00). Lastly, please remember to bring in your parent/student feedback forms, if you haven’t already. We would really love to hear from you!

Enjoy the rest of your week,

Matt and Kim (and Aden!)

Art Attack!

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Hey Folks!

At Forest School, we develop a lot of skills: physical and emotional intelligence, ecological literacy, and much more. In more traditional school terms, we’ve had a heavy focus on Science, Physical Education, and English, with some Art and even Math included in there. Usually, we pick a topic and focus our lessons around it. This week we decided to focus on a subject rather than topic, Art, and see where that took us through our student-led, emergent and inquiry-based learning. Hence both days unfolding differently.

Remember that old TV show Art Attack? It was all the rage when we were growing up. So we decided to replicate that this week as our culminating project… the only catch? In order to get the materials, the students had to “buy” them with points earned through team-building challenges and other art projects throughout the day.

Our first project was a cheerio bird feeder to replace our old pb ones in our sit spots. The Red tails then drew pictures of all the birds they thought would visit their feeders, as the Snowy Owls came up with conversational pieces (and dramatic plays) of the what the birds were up to in their sit spot and saying to each other. Quite a treat to see your children’s imagination at play here!

Throughout the day students completed a lot of team-building challenges. These focus on developing teamwork, communication and trust among participants. The activities have no right answer, the learning being the process. The students were put in a variety scenarios – cross through the “spider web”, navigate lava rivers, become an ant on a log and switch places with everyone, flip the tarp over without getting off, and the human knot – whatever the case they were up for the challenge. And they earned valuable points along the way for their final masterpiece. In some cases, not all attempts were a “success” in terms of completion. But the debriefing process that ensued was full of learning, and incredible to watch and facilitate.

Both groups had a great time making their new hiking sticks as well. Using a variety of paints, hemp strings and carving, the students came up with some beautiful pieces of usable art. And even built a totem pole for our Forest Hut area.

The final project involved using our “loose parts” (anything that can be moved, natural or not, to create things). From high up on fossil mountain, the teachers watched as the students used the material they had earned, along with things in their surroundings to create a masterpiece from the bird’s eye view.

As for beads, we gave our very first peer support bead this week! We also gave out a whole bunch of craft beads for some awesome crafts, including the titanic, a bird/squirrel house, a homemade starbucks mug, a clay teepee and natural puppets.

See you next week!

Kim and Matt

I speak for the trees

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Hey Folks!

It seems that spring has finally arrived which meant a couple of welcomed sunny, warm days at Forest School. This week, we focused on trees – beginning with one of our favourite games, Sappy Sappy, to get the energy flowing.

After our initial check-ins, smudge ceremony and some yoga, the students paired up and took turns blindfolding and leading each other to a random tree in our area. It was up to the blindfolded student to collect as much information as possible with their other senses about the tree, give it a big hug, then try to find it after being returned to the starting point to remove the blindfold. For the most part, everyone was able to find their special tree – different barks, needles, sizes and smells were all good indicators.

Afterwards, we sat down and spent some time reading the “Lorax”. We are beginning to encourage a stewardship of the land for students and what story could be better? The students had a lot of great reflections about the story, and it even turned into a game of hide and seek, where the “Lorax” would hide behind a tree, and when found, would chase down all the “Oncelers” to stop them from cutting down trees (see Lorax Tag).

Also on Wednesday, the students eagerly jumped in to help our friend Al clean up all the down branches and twigs from the ice storm a few weeks ago. What a great, spontaneous opportunity for service-learning and taking responsibility of the land we use.

Before lunch we visited our sit spots with our journals in hand and a new task: Adopt-a-Tree. Students chose a tree nearby their spots and were asked to study it, name it and commit to taking care of their tree. With the help of ID books, students were able to figure out their type of tree and some facts about them. Some students on Thursday even created “adoption sheets” complete with all the useful information they could think of about their tree. When we got back to the school house, students presented their trees to the group enthusiastically, by sharing why their tree was so great and why they loved it. (The Snowy Owls have also been given “homework” to find out interesting facts about their tree to share with the group next week.)

The afternoon saw an opportunity for exploration and free-play. Free-play happens daily at the school, and it’s always intriguing to observe and see how the children interact, imagine and cooperate. It was fun to quietly watch on Thursday as games emerged with rules first created, then talked about, tried out and then sometimes changed. On Wednesday, students chose to take on a huge undertaking to make a snowman from the last remaining pile of snow (thanks to the shade from our trees)! An incredible amount of teamwork and communication was needed to lift the second ball on top of the first.

Later on, after a bit more talk about trees, we headed out to the fire pit. By popular demand, we furthered our learning on fire making and took the first steps towards earning fire beads. Student made “nests” from dry grass, sawdust, lint and birch bark. The students were able to make fire in their nest using only a coal and blowing slowly. The next step will be flint and steel (which some students are already mastering) and char cloth.

It seems we fit a lot into the days this week – the sun sure was a great motivator in that!

Congrats to our bead recipients this week as well: 2 storytelling beads were earned and our our very first journaling/reflection bead!

A heads up, too – your child may be snooping around your leftover veggies and fruits for seeds to plant in the upcoming weeks.

See you next week!

Matt and Kim

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot. Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” -The Lorax

Here Fishy, Fishy

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Hey Folks!

March Break didn’t stop us from going to school. This week, we welcomed brand new students to our school and now offer a Wednesday program in addition to Thursday! As an emergent-learning and student-centered program, both days unfolded in similar yet unique ways.

The Red Tailed Hawks and Snowy Owls were quite adventurous this week. After our regular check-ins and smudging ceremony, we spent some time learning about fish through interactive games, like a new favourite Fishy, Fishy. Some explorers were also able to spend some quality time in our sit spots and journal about things they saw and changes they noticed since the last time they were there.

Soon after, we were off to the Georgian Triangle Angler’s Association fish hatchery. Here we learned about the life cycles of fish by observing first-hand the GTAA’s efforts at enhancing populations of trout in the Georgian Triangle. The students were able to see, feed and hold (in nets) both brown and rainbow trout. The fish ranged in age from a couple months to almost two years and ready for release. Afterwards, we explored the creek and pond nearby to locate “escapees”.

Equally important as the hatchery itself was the connection the students could make to our own property. The GTAA will be releasing some fish in the student-named “Sugar Shack River” leading into “Willow Lake” at bygone days later on this year. This was exciting news for our students, with dreams of “catching huge fish!” in the lake.

WEDNESDAY

Our afternoons varied between the two days. Wednesday saw the students head over to “Fossil Mountain” and explore new frontiers of the property (which led to the discovery of the “Endless Desert” and “Sugar Shack River”). We had a lesson in erosion and river formation in the sand dunes, as well as damming. It got quite muddy!

Then it was off to build huts and a fire. Despite the rain (or maybe because of it), the students quickly set up natural shelters and a tarp to remain dry. We got a fire going, with everyone taking shot at making sparks with flint and steel.

THURSDAY

Thursday afternoon saw trust- and communication-building through a blindfolded hike. Then it was off to build a huge natural shelter to fit the whole team-so big in fact we weren’t able to finish it. The students quickly self-divided into roles (stick collectors, shelter builders, cleaners, grass-getters, etc) and in no time we had worked together to make a masterpiece.

Afterwards we celebrated with a fire and marshmallows. The students all had a chance to try using flint and steel and catch a spark on charcloth. They did very well, and this is a skill we will continue to work on.

All in all, a great week. We hope you are enjoying your March Break as much as we are!

Until next time,

Kim and Matt

If you’d like more information about the GTAA please click here to visit their website