A fresh blanket of white snow greeted us in Memorial Park this morning! Many more changes became apparent as we explored, including erosion along the beach, signs of the wind storm, iced leaves, and a certain hush to the forest that comes with the first snowfall.
Birch bark was our offering this morning, which the students tucked into their pockets to save as tinder for our fire later in the day. Ask them about the “Tree Rap” we were working on, to help us learn about the special properties of some trees in our neighborhood. Today we rapped the birch verse and chorus, with more coming your way soon! Stay tuned.
North, South, East and West, is there a direction you like the best? Orienting ourselves in the park was a recurring theme of the day, through games and stories. Do you know which direction the park is from your house? It would be neat to hear next week all the different directions we are all coming from!
This week our students got really excited about creating communities in different areas of our forests to stake a claim and create a personal village for each group. After a quick recap and learning about three basic survival shelters (Lean-to, Teepee and Debris), we chose a place on the map and headed out to let our creations come to life. The groups worked well together creating forts, stores, trading posts, hospitals and much more. The shelters became more than just for survival – they were well landscaped with walls, gardens and benches. We left the forest every day excited to return and add more to these ongoing projects.
The stories that came to life with the shelter building was paramount, if not more so than the construction! One group even created an entire fantasy world after coming up with the idea of LARPing (Live action role play). Governing rules have been established, challenges created and backstories established for all characters. Stay tuned next week for all the details – we love rolling with child passions as it always leads to incredible adventure and learning.
Aside from all that, we were treated with the return of the Trumpeter Swans this week. After connecting with the Trumpeter Swan Society, we know that one of our swans is the offspring of Swan 100 – the first of its kind born in the wild in Ontario in 100 years. A big thanks to the students who carefully took the time and had the patience to find out their tracking numbers!
In other news, we’ve also shut down our Maple Syrup production as we were overwhelmed with how much sap we collected this year! We’ve moved on to tapping a small amount of Birch trees (which are at least 80:1 in ratio). The students from Tuesday have also found another way to harvest it – snip a little branch and attached a plastic bottle. So far, it’s working really well!
Lesley is a teacher at our Collingwood location. She is an Ontario certified teacher with a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering from the University of Waterloo and a Bachelor of Education in mathematics and physics from Queen’s University. She is currently completing an outdoor education course from Queen’s University. For the past 15 years, Lesley has taught at international schools around the world, including South Korea, Egypt, Sint Maarten, China, and Guatemala. Lesley believes in inquiry-based and student-centered learning and values making connections between education and the world around us.
During the pandemic her son attended a forest school, where she was drawn to the energy and happiness of the children. It made her wish all schools could be more like forest schools and encouraged her to pursue a career in teaching outdoors where a natural and wholistic approach to teaching and learning is valued. As a teacher, she is mindful, patient, and calm with a goal to create an environment where students feel safe and comfortable to learn, investigate, and explore. Lesley loves yoga, scuba diving, baseball, and snowboarding. When she’s not teaching, she’s usually playing outside with her kids or going on an adventure.
Another great day in the books with our amazing students, this week at Forest School was all about reflection and hiking! After our morning smudge circle, our class raced to the van and headed to one of our favourite Brue Trail hike spots – Loree Forest. The past two rainy days gave us a great opportunity to find animal tracks in the soft mud (fox, deer and dog..or maybe wolves), the kids earned some beads as well!
Our students also came across huge patches of poison ivy, salamanders, garter snakes, caterpillars, centipedes, worms, slugs and an abundance of “Jack in the pulpit” flowers.
Our hike took us to the top of the Georgian Peaks, and after our snack and check ins, we had an in depth discussion about bullying. It was amazing to see our students support each other, there was no shortage of great advice, thats for sure. Sometimes we forget how hard it is to be a kid these days, but the courage to ask for help makes it a lot easier. Afterwards, we took some time to relax in the beautiful sunshine and reflect on our past week.
Within our afternoon our kids kept super busy by revisiting their favourite game “Farmer”, while some went for an epic frog hunt (17 in total), and others spent time building animal shelters. Sticking with our reflection theme, we thought back to our morning hike and wrote down what we saw, smelled, heard and touched. Our class is becoming incredibly independent and creating self-led activities. We are SO proud!
Today we formed even stronger bonds with each other by sharing advice, and encouragement. All of the support our students recieve goes along way outside of out classroom. Students gained more show and share beads, litter less lunch beads, fire beads, animal tracking beads and everyone deserved an exciting Al bead. Congrats!
Next week – We are going to be paddling the Beaver River.
It is amazing what rain, sun, and a few weeks will do for our Heathcote property. The shrubs and flowers have grown so much that we almost couldn’t find some of our sit spots. Our day consisted of the learning and widening our knowledge about wild edibles and plants! With so much to talk about we focused on the famous poison ivy, along with it’s friends poison sumac and oak. We also focused a lot on expanding our imagination, teamwork, communication and respecting those attributes. Check out our wicked day!
A couple of weeks ago our students started their potato gardens, which have now started to sprout amazing leaves – soon enough we will be able to cook up those home-grown spuds! A toad hunt served as an excellent addition to all the excitement today, which included our respectful catching and releasing rituals. Midway through our hunt, Taven came across, what we believe to be a rat skull, YUCK! (but it was pretty cool!) To add to our discoveries through out the day we even came across two baby moles hiding in our compost area. We are hoping to see them again next week!
One of our main tasks throughout our day was to find a new or familiar plant life and identify it from our nature books. Some of our finding were Queens Anne’s lace, Mustard Garlic, Buttercups, Dog wood, and many more! It is great to see our students taking the initiative to gain more knowledge and educate their fellow classmates on their findings. Our students also learned very quickly that it is hard to decipher between some plants due to many of them looking the same, as well as being unsure about whether or not a plant is safe to pick, or eat!
Staying true to our lesson, our afternoon consisted of digging into our seed library! We came across some cucumbers, mint, daises, peas, beans, lavender, spinach, zucchini, kale and sunflower seeds. Our students were given 6 decomposing containers and the opportunity to plants 6 of their favourite seeds. Active play was also a huge part of our afternoon, along with the whole class participating in a game of “Farmer and the Horse”. This game was one of the highlights for all of our students, and while some played this all afternoon, others played in their sit spots, became fire keepers, and identified more plants.
Today there were 4 respect beads earned, along with 2 litter less lunches, 1 shelter, 2 show and share and 6 curiosity beads. Great job to everyone!
This week at Forest School we looked at our Eco System, and tied in some fun games along the way! It also brought opportunities for new discoveries, and an activity we haven’t done since last September, frog hunting! After our morning routines, our day started with an intense football game to get our blood pumping. We also challenged our kids with food-chain games along with an Eco System freeze tag! We were so active enjoying the beautiful spring weather, and a little too clean – so we had to get a little dirty, or it just wouldn’t be Forest School.
Our main lesson of the day was to learn about our Consumers (Animals and Humans), Producers (Plants that grow from the ground), and Decomposers (Slugs, Snails and Worms). We tested our knowledge with a skill testing questions, a mix and match game, and though it came challenging for all at the end of the game, we all had a better understanding of each topic. With all the hard work we did, it paid off and we got a fun game out of it!
So while we were on our hike surrounded by tons of producers, looking for evidence of consumers (Racoon tracks, Beaver and Canadian Geese) and finding decomposers (Snails, Worms and centipedes) we spotted our FIRST Beaver of the season! We now have a better idea of who is chopping down all those trees! It was a beautiful day to relax and so we spent a large part of our afternoon working on our sit spots where we reflect, write in our journals and explore our 5 senses. Using the knowledge from our earlier lesson, we brainstormed examples of Consumers, Producers and Decomposers and used our imagination to write a story about their favourite animal along with a food chain associated with them.
With all of the beautiful sunshine and heat today, we were over joyed to see our first frog of the season as well, which lead into an impromptu frog hunt! Our kids didn’t lose any agility over the Winter to catch our little friends, and in total we caught 11 Frogs! All frogs went back home safe and sound. Along with this fun activity, we even had time at the end of the day to do some fishing. Unfortunately we didn’t catch anything this week, but we are looking forward to our next opportunity.
Our Morning Glory starting to sprout
This week was full of Wisdom stickers, Respect sticker and Love. Exciting news – we are getting close to some prizes! There was also 1 Al bead earned, 4 Litterless Lunch and 2 Show and Tell Beads.
Next Week – We are going to be looking into the fun and exciting world of Birds!
“Creativity is contagious, pass it on” – Albert Einstein
This week at Forest school, it was a student-led emergent day full of creativity. It was amazing to watch how the day unfolded through team-building activities that strived towards working together, communication and memory.
Our students worked both individually and together to construct a masterpiece of art from natural products as well as with man-made materials. Did I mention there was a lot of mud involved?
This was a great day for our kids to be as creative as they could!
Check it out!
The fog was amazing this morning and while we were sitting quietly across from the Beaver River, we spotted a Blue Heron hunting for his breakfast.
We hunted down our natural paint brushes, paint (wild grapes, blueberries, and crab apples) and objects to stick onto our artwork (leaves, cedar scales and grass).
One of our team-building activities was the create our favourite animals out of pipe cleaners. Some of our creations were a Wolf, Thunderbird, Salamander and Octopus.
Another activity that was completed was “The Maze”. Communication and memory was the name of the game!
Our students creating their art with natural paint brushes, mud, rocks, wood cookies and cold ash from the fire pit.
“The Village”. This was created by all students and everyone had their job. Some students worked on concrete (water and mud), digging holes, building homes and roping off future development.
Some of the artwork our students created today!
Today was an amazing muddy day full of adventure and creativity.
Great job Taven and Jack for starting their first fire without any help! What amazing stories we had around the fire as well, so make sure you ask your child what story they told. This meant we gave away our first Storytelling beads! Great job everyone!
Next Week – We are going to be looking into Environmental Science.
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.
Your child was able to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of concepts learned throughout our Forest School in our culminating Amazing Race Challenge. Using their compasses and orienteering skills, they navigated through various team building exercises, survived a terrible storm in a shelter, and indulged in placed-based learning by the infamous Fossil Mountain. Along the way, students answered questions related to safety, the Grandfather Teachings, medicine wheel, animals we studied, LNT principles, and tracking to earn material used for a building a small fire to celebrate our final time together. We processed the learning experienced throughout the “year” and shared many memories and laughs along the way.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, we cannot thank you enough for diving into this program with us and trusting us for the beginning stages of our Forest School. We know that the fall will look similar in terms of nature-based emergent learning and we look forward to creating more opportunities to grow and learn outdoors with your children. If you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to reach out. Uploaded soon will be a registration form for next year.
Thank you again for an amazing semester! Enjoy your exploring this summer!
We hope to see you on the trails/rivers/rock walls,
Our Forest School day this week was spent on our first all day outing. Early in the morning, we loaded up the van and headed out to Metcalfe Rock, in the Kolapore Uplands. This beautiful area in our own backyard runs along the Bruce Trail and smack dab in the middle of the Niagara Escarpment. Our main purpose today: Caving.
Students geared up in harnesses, buckled up their helmets and strapped on their headlamps, eager to begin exploring. After quick LNT lessons from the students, and safety lessons from teachers, we dove (or rather crawled, contorted, slid) right into the crevice caves. Students’ comfort levels varied, but everyone put on a brave face and pushed their limits just out of their comfort zones. Some of the students were absolutely fearless and even made it all the way to the deep dark depths of the Bat Cave!
Afterwards, we got to enjoy and explore this wonderful area (protected by UNESCO). The kids were even able to hug the unique “braided-root” tree, a living ancient white cedar around 1000 years old! They also built shelters (Wed), had marshmallows on the fire (Thurs), played games and drank the “best tasting water ever” from the natural spring.
Wednesday was especially fun this week because we were joined by Shannon from our sister school and her Red Tailed Hawks for all the fun – a big thanks to everyone in your crew Shannon! On the same day, we even had a professional movie maker come out to make a promotional video. We’ll put the link up here when it is ready.
Thursday we also had a photographer out with us taking promotional pictures. We’ll add the photos here when they arrive.
Both groups also set up new geocaches on-site. Their coordinates will soon be up on Geocaching.com, known as ForestSchool1 and ForestSchool2 (for now you can find them at 1. N44 29.365 W080 15.436 and 2. N44 29.401 W080 15.364). You can try and find them with your kids! Don’t have a GPS? Download the app and find them with your phone!
