Outdoor Feb 5&6

Thursday

This day began with movement through our tools in circle, an informative meditation time and beautiful song ❤

Today we read Winter Walk, and though most students heard it yesterday, it was a loved story all the same.

Our learning today was about garden planning, continuing from last week. All plants students wanted to plant in the garden were written on cards, that we worked together to sound out and read together, then chose where they would go. We began with what is already growing in our garden and reminding ourselves where those plants were. After we placed all the items in our garden plan, we ordered our seeds and plants!

Our morning was spent exploring activities, with lots of creativity showing up from everyone. We played freeze dance too!

Our first outside hour was spent playing in Heartwood Hotel ❤ aka the snow pile in the driveway. After digging and playing we returned inside for lunch and free play before we headed out for our afternoon hike.

Our afternoon hike was full of excitement as we travelled across the bridge to the "tallest hill" to slide down. Along the way we spotted a very big Hawk eating some lunch in the field. After it flew away I went to visit the lunch spot and found Rabbit fur with white tips and brown and grey stalks. We determined the Hawk had caught a great meal of Rabbit, and we even got to see the Hawk fly away with it's leftovers. Lots of discussion around the circle of life with animals happened today.

Everyone had fun sliding down the hill too.

We ended our day with free play and Oakley built a flying Robot!

Friday

Today was Gordie and I, so we made lots of space to explore all the learning materials that were out first thing. Gordie chose to arrange all the toys into their life cycles and did a fabulous job working from the life cycle cards and matching the stages.

For morning circle today our animal cards pulled were Wolf and Coyote. We used their meanings to create word bracelets for ourselves in an ABAB pattern..

During snack time, I read two stories: Over and Under the Snow and Big Tracks, Little Tracks. We learned a lot about animals today!

After snack we had a bit more free play time, where Gordie created a telescope with the magnet tiles! We prepared for outside and chose to finish the tunnel we began yesterday. We are happy to report that Heartwood Hotel now has a second tunnel!

We returned indoors for lunch and a learning activity around food chains. Gordie was introduced to the following terms: energy sources (sun, soil and water), producers/herbivores, primary consumers/carnivores, secondary consumers/carnivores and tertiary consumers/carnivores that only eat other carnivores, and decomposers. Gordie was able to identify successfully where all the animals and plants belonged in the circle and this was all related back to the circle of life to build further on yesterday's learning.

We went out for our last hike of the week after cleaning up and preparing for home. This time we visited the bridge so Gordie could throw a stick in the water and he learned which sticks we can use for that (dead sticks not attached to trees). We played at the skate park slipping down the quarter pipes and watched the cross country skiers go by and noticed more Hawks flying high in the sky.

We returned once more and played in the dollhouse together to end our day.

Have an amazing weekend!