Today was packed full of exploration, curiosity and new skills! With our focus on wilderness survival we decided to gear our day towards learning about our furry little friends and how they survive our harsh, Canadian winters. Our students decided to start their day by working towards a new bead – “starting a fire without a match”. What a great way to start our day. Thank you Lara for bringing in your show and tell item which also acted as a tool for our fire. This hand held flint and steel was a challenge for some but after lots of persistence and determination we were able to start our fire.
“This is the best fire I have ever seen” -Izzy
After reading the book “Over and Under the Snow” by Kate Messner our students had the opportunity to visit the back bush and search for evidence of our little friends living under the snow. We found animal prints, animal holes, tunnels and fur under the snow. We also had a lot of fun “skating” and dancing on the ice that was left over from the storm earlier this week. This activity touched on three elements for animal survival – Hibernation, Migration and Keeping Active!
Hibernation (also keeping warm) is a huge part of survival; it is also something we strive for every day at Forest School. One of our goals of the day was to get the kids to brainstorm and idea. How would they would keep a jar of water warm and from losing heat in the cold? The challenge was accepted by all! We spent some time pretending our jars were animals and the outer layers (rubber pads, cloth, bubble wrap) were the fur and fat. We buried our jars in snow and will check on them next week just like the wild we believe that some will survive and others will not.
We took a moment out of our day to act like birds for the “Amazing Bird Wilderness Survival Game”. We paired up and each team received a “Bird information card” which included information about their diet and habitat. Their goal was to migrate through this large scale board game while coming across man-made and natural obstacles such as high winds, oil spill, clean windows, BB guns and other predators. We started with 12 birds and only 6 survived.
With all of this talk about animal survival, we then spent some time discussing how we would survive in the winter. We started our first survival kit that we will continue to add to over this semester. We continued to improve on our shelter building skills and some of our students tried their hands at a new skill – the bow and drill. We learned it was harder than it looks and when it starts to smoke, it smells like marshmallows!
With all that was going on we still found time to learn yet another new skill from one of our students. Thank-you Dax for showing your fellow classmates how to make a “slip knot”, and all of our students were able to complete one knot after the demonstration. Congratulations for earning the Teaching bead!
What a day for stickers and beads! Our stickers included 10 Respect, 8 Wisdom and 1 Bravery, and our beads included 1 Teaching, 3 Fire, 10 Shelter and 1 show and tell. Congratulations to everyone!
What an interesting day we had for our Winter, wait scratch that, Freezing Rain Survival days. We went into this expecting to create quinzees and spend all day in the snow, but who could’ve guessed our snow would turn to ice so quickly!? So what can we do but make the best of the situation?? And that’s exactly what we did.
Our day was focused on what animals do to survive during the winter. After visualizing and becoming the animal of their choice, students were asked what they would do to survive in the winter. Some said they would sleep, others would hunt and others said they would move to somewhere warm. This covered all of our bases and in essence they already knew: hibernate, stay active, or migrate.
After reading an incredible story (Over and Under the Snow by Kate Messner – seriously check it out if you don’t have it) to set the tone for the day, the students designed their own “Subnivean Cities”. This under-snow layer captivated the imagination of students, and we were even able to explore the real thing outside once the rain subsided.
Over and Under the Snow
To get a little more in depth with hibernation, students were teamed up and given a jar half-full of water. Their mission? To ensure this water doesn’t freeze even after being left outside for a week. Students attacked this challenge head on and started to come up with super creative ideas to insulate and protect the water. The water jars became their “Frogs”, Snakes” or “Turtles”, and when the layers were complete they now needed a safe space to hibernate. Outside the students searched and found ideal places for their “amphibians” and “reptiles” to sleep… buried deep in the ground, insulated by debris, dirt and snow. We’ll see what happens next week!
Insulating our “frogs” for hibernation
Add in some time playing student-created games, tracking animals and one another, engaging in a creative Forest School buff fashion show, having a bonfire while reading legend, and completing an adventurous hike to find a geocache, and it seems we had quite a busy day.
And still the students returned to the classroom for one final challenge. In partners, they were given a particular bird species outlined like a Pokemon Card that showed their strengths, habits, diets etc. As this specific type of bird, students had to navigate a human-sized board game to show just how difficult migration can be and the potential threats that birds can face en-route. By the end, only a couple groups were able to migrate safely, but we developed really great insight about birds and their journeys during the winter.
(We had a request from a student for a copy of this game – it can be printed out by clicking here)
Migrating
Congratulations to our 3 Show and Tell bead recipients for bringing in a spider man web shooter, a handmade pair of moccasins and some awesome Polaroid pictures. We also gave out 2 musical beads for some stellar renditions of songs from the Lion King and a Bravery Bead!
Next Week:
Field Trip! We’ll be heading out to do some Cross Country Skiing!
We sure had practice with our balance on all that ice this week – here’s hoping for some snow next week.
Matt and Kim
Neal found a full fire extinguisher…or at least the kids thought it was full…it was empty, but the reactions were priceless!
We would like to welcome back all of our students to Free Spirit Forest School for the winter semester and we are happy to introduce one of our newest teachers; Neal!
This week was all about getting comfortable with outside travel. We took time to set our intentions for Forest School meaning, how we treat fellow classmates and things we want to let go of either personally or physically.
The lack of snow didn’t slow us down. We kept positive and made the best of our icy, winter wonderland! We are looking forward to the rest of our semester and all the adventure it will bring us through exploration and curiosity. The sky is the limit!
Forest School 2017 Class Photo
We welcome our new class of 2017! They are strong, hilarious, curious and a genuinely happy group of kids that we are excited to spend every Thursday with!
“The Earth Ship” is now our drop off and pick up location so we decided to start our day with a quick exploration around our new grounds. We found a wonderful moment when our students built their very first firepit. Many hands helped with this project and we couldn’t have had a better turn out! Through communication, working together and hard work our students built their first project together. Great job guys and gals!
One of our tasks of the day was to create our “Forest School Agreement” between students and teachers. It was wonderful to see all students participating in delivering what they want to get out of Forest School. We discussed respect (personal, other students boundries and our surroundings), listening (the difference between hearing and listening), communications and many many more. Check out what the kids came up with!
Our last adventure of the day was to gain the skills and knowledge to hunt down objects to create their own “emergency” snowshoes. We cut sticks, braided willow twigs, used ripped up t-shirts and twine. All of our students were able to create snowshoes that stayed afloat and held their body weight. We are super proud of all the hard work that went into their shoes and are excited to use them in further activities.
Dax showing off his “A” frame snowshoes
Congratulations to all our students who received their first of many respect stickers. Next week we are looking forward to giving away some beads! Keep up the good work everybody!
Next Week – Is all about wilderness survival! We will be looking at Food, Shelter and Fire…..we wonder what the kids think they will need to survive?
On our last day of Forest School this year, the students’ skills were put to the test with an Amazing Race. Just like in the show, the classes had to work their way through Team Challenges, Road Blocks (completed by one person) and Detours (choice between 2 activities) while earning materials (tinder, kindling, a pot, etc) along the way for their final challenge of the day.
The Amazing Race encompassed almost everything we’ve covered this semester. Various challenges, like the tarp flip, human knot and blindfolded hikes, showed us just how well these groups worked together as teams. The group dynamic here was quite powerful! Other activities challenged hard skills (knots, compass and GPS use, and fire building) while knowledge tests showed us just how much they’ve learned and retained this year. We even called on skills we haven’t learned here, like clues being translated from French!
No matter the challenge, they rose to it. Throw in some snowshoeing, tobogganing, “skating” on the pond, and cedar tea made over the fire (the Final Challenge) and we’ll call it a day well spent outside.
In the spirit of the day, we spent a good chunk of it debriefing the year and looking forward to the next aspects of Forest School. Students were reflective when filling out their report cards and gathered all their stuff (sticker boards, journals and medallions) to take home. As many of you know, we wrapped the day up with a gathering at the Earthship for some drinks and a movie (see above for the movie!)
A big, big thanks to you, the parents, for believing in what we are doing and trusting in us to accomplish this. We couldn’t do it without your constant support. It’s been a real pleasure teaching, learning and growing with your kids. We are loving the sense of community that is developing with this program and are eager to keep it going! See you in the New Year!
Next year:
-If your child or children are returning, please send them back with their journals and medallions so they can continue collecting new beads.
-While we will still be using the property at Bygone Days, we are excited to be calling the Earthship our home for the Winter Semester! (How incredible is it that our classroom is in an Earthship?!) Drop off and pick-up will be there (633 Sixth St) at the same times.
– Please note that we’ve put up a tentative schedule for the Winter Semester on our calendar.
Enjoy the Winter break! Have a happy and healthy holiday and Merry, Merry Christmas!
Our first semester of Forest School ended just the way it started, AMAZING. Our jam packed day consisted of our students using the skills, and knowledge they have obtained here at Forest School. “The Amazing Winter Race” started with us using a map to navigate ourselves to 7 different checkpoints, which consisted of various team-building activities, a crazy spider web, snow lava rock wall, and more mapping with our “Santa candy cane hunt”. We spent so much time today talking about our favourite memories, and what we are excitied about for the Spring.
This morning brought us back to Animal tracking week! Aaron had a keen eye with finding these bunny tracks right beside the Greenhouse.
Izzy was kind enough to bring in a very special rock to show the class before our amazing race. She called it a “Peacock Rock” This picture does not give the colour within the rock justice. Thank you Izzy for bringing in such a special rock to share with us.
We tested our memory with our Forest School matching game. Everything that we had talked about within class was brought up in this fun game. It was challenging for all of our students but everything was matched up by the end of it! Great job everyone you worked so hard!
Enjoying some active play over lunch, and letting our imaginations run wild! Did I mention we have some beautiful minds?
It’s a good thing we know how to read a map, or we would be walking in circles all day long! Our map took us all around our spacious Heathcote property and let us create new memories to treasure, it’s pretty amazing where a map can take you.
Our last task was to create another fire! One fire was started by Alice, Jack and Emily. Our kids have gained the skills and knowledge to seek, build and start their own fires without any help at all! I am so proud of everyone and all their hard work. Finding down sticks under the snow isn’t easy.
I cannot thank you enough (parents and kids) for the incredible 1st Forest School semester we just had, and jumping into this program with me! We have crushed our goals, gained knowledge, confidence and budding friendships through our laughter and tears. We are looking forward to the all the new ones we make this Spring!
Check out our bonus pictures below!
Have a healthy, happy holiday everyone! See you in the New Year!
With winter finally here we decided to stay close to home and focus our day on fire, shelter and cooking! The windy weather did not slow our students down..I think it gave them more energy! It was also great to see the kids imagination play unfold with each other, from turning the sleds into a train (stops and pick up included) to being reindeer, and gathering food. This bonding time is extremely important for our kids to connect with eatchother and create memories! To earn our cooking bead this week, we decided to challenge ourselves with bread, and a sweet treat with chocolate chip cookies!
Question of the day was: How burnt does the food have to be before you do not eat it?
As per usual our day started with our smudging ceremony, check-ins, and of course our amazing show and tell items that our students brought from home. A huge Thank-you to Alice for bringing in a seagull skull (it was incredibly clean as well), and Adam brought in a fully intact bees nest…no bees included.
We are so proud of Aaron for rocking his first fire today! Aaron used minimal amount of tinder and dead, dry and down sticks from our area. The fire kept us super warm all day! Thanks buddy!
We focused on a different type of shelter today, which was the “Quincy”. This common winter shelter is a snow mound that will be dug out to be able to fit one or two students at a time. We started in the green house with an in-class discussion about this type of shelter, and then took our learning outside to create this structure. We are hoping that the snow fall this week will add to our shelter and help make it bigger!
These awesome little people were working hard on earning their cooking bead today, and if you didn’t eat the burnt part of the bread, it was pretty amazing! Butter makes everything better…or so they say!
We took a break from our winter wonderland to create some Christmas ornaments from natural, and man made objects. Our students have amazing imaginations and at the end we came out with some awesome creations to take home.
Cookies…..need I say more?
High Fives all around for all our students who worked so hard today with Quincy building, fire starting, cooking and active group play! There was a lot of beads and stickers earned today: 3 cooking beads, 3 storytelling beads, 2 respect stickers and 1 honesty.
Next Week – We cant believe how fast the time has gone and how sad it will be to say “goodbye” next Wednesday at our final week of the fall semester! We will be putting our students to the test on our Winter wonderland “Amazing Race” challenges. Let the games begin!
Though tough for drivers, the snowstorm over the weekend was sure welcomed by us! It gave the perfect amount of time for local animals to run around and have their prints frozen in place for us to discover. As the temperatures warmed up, we were able to also see lots of tracks captured in the mud.
Tracking animals was our goal this week – and we were after much more than just footprints. Deer hair on trees, animal pee and, yes, even some coyote scat were all welcomed signs. We also used our ears to hear if animals were giving themselves away… turns out there is a lot of noise in silence.
Overall, we found a bunch of different animal tracks. Lots of white-tailed deer, some red foxes, rabbits, geese and other birds, and of course, Aden! He also gave us a first hand look at canine paws – toes, claws, dew-claws, and the heel. Some students even put their skills to use to track the teachers and find them!
On both days, and in different areas throughout Loree forests, the children were drawn to the hills and made impromptu slides with all the snow. It was magical to see the imagination, teamwork and good old fashion fun come to life.
Towards the end of the day, after completing Track ID 101, finding tracks, GPS tracking, and interpreting a picture of tracks by creating a story of what happened, the students had one more task to complete before receiving their Animal Tracking Beads: survive “Survival”. And they did. Congrats to all our new Tracking Bead recipients!
In addition to the Animal tracking beads, we gave out a record this week – 3 beads to one student, in one day! A couple of people received the Nature Lover Bead, other earned their Reflection Beads (for 15+ journal entries), a few creative Craft Beads were distributed, and a wonderful Teaching Bead on the origins of Popcorn. With only 2 weeks left, please encourage your children to finish up any bead work!
Next Week: Shelters!!!
FRIENDLY REMINDERS:
Even though we are now into some Winter weather, we are still pretty comfortable at Bygone days. We plan to be outside as much as possible so please remember to send your children with layers… too many is better than not enough. At minimum your child needs a good warm toque and mittens/gloves, warm coat and snow pants, with a back up pair of splash pants. A back-up pair of gloves and hats would be good too. Remember – we are out exploring and sometimes that means snow, puddles, mud, etc. Thanks to everyone who is ensuring this – learning can’t happen when we are cold.
Our classroom is unheated and usually not much warmer than outside. On our end, we have:
A new Chiminea to have a fire going nearby
Small heaters to dry gloves
A kettle and tea (please send your child with a mug if they would like some; and it warms the hands!)
Extra gloves/hats just in case; and
For especially cold days, access to a warm space at the Youth Centre (though this is our last resort)
And one final thing! We’ve had some inquiries about Forest School for the winter semester. Just to clarify, some parents thought their children were going to be automatically enrolled in the winter semester which is not the case. If you want to enroll for the winter semester, you need to go to https://fsforestschool.com/register/. Or you can email Jennie Elmslie at freespirittours@hotmail.com. Spaces are beginning to fill up!
Challenge: Go out and explore this week with your child!
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!
This week we challenged our students to see how they would survive a night lost in the woods. The morning had us off to our old campsite to take some quiet space alone to reflect on what it would feel like to be lost – what would you be thinking? What would you do? What could you use around you to stay safe?
During our debrief around the fire, we uncovered that immediately your psychology and attitude are a huge aspect to dealing with a survival situation. We called this S.T.O.P. – Stop, Think, Observe and Plan.
We then dove into the 4 Core attributes to Survival which, on both days, students were able to brainstorm on their own through discussion. Shelter, Fire, Water, Food – and in that order. The most important thing is staying warm (which we had first-hand experience with this week – and thanks to you, the parents, for all the great layers you sent your kids with!)
We had a lot of fun putting the 4 Cores into practice and students realized that they already had a lot of the skills needed. We made fires, shelter and did some exploratory hiking (and even “Sand”boggoning on Wed). In teams, we played out a scenario involving a plane crash and prioritized 12 items we would need and why – there were no wrong answers, just a need to justify. Oh, and how could any Survival day be complete without a little Animal Survival game?
Congrats to our Peer Support Bead recipient, 2 Reflection Beads, 1 Craft Bead and an amazing Storytelling Bead!
Next Week: We’ll be having some fun and getting creative making projects!
