Outdoor February 12&13

Thursday

We began in circle today moving our energy, calling in new energy and activating our intuition with our hand claps. After we hand clap, we rub our hands together and separate them to see if we can feel the size of our energy each day. Lots of big energy was showing up today. Everyone had insightful sit spots and we changed ohm together to end our morning circle.

During snack we heard "Tree Hole Homes - Daytime Dens and Nighttime Nooks" to begin our focus on animal learning for the next two months. We will work from some of the animals in this book as we move through into Spring, which will support the outdoor students to have a deeper understanding of animal classifications and more.

After free time playing with the dollhouse, we learned that the seeds we ordered for our garden arrived!!!! We will need to wait for the plants we ordered until the threat of frost is gone. In the meantime, everyone became more familiar with the names of our seeds, and utilized an image of our garden plan from last week to place everything where it belonged in our plan. Afterward, students explored the numbers on the seed packets as we began looking for planting instructions. We separated our seeds into two groups: Our start inside seeds, and our start outside seeds. Next week we will be mapping out how long each seed will take to bear fruit on a calendar so everyone can see how long the plant life cycle really is.

Next we pulled out maps of the playground to add the cardinal directions and played a running game to become more familiar with where the directions are inside the school. We will continue to expand on where the directions are outside and around the neighbourhood throughout the remainder of the year.

Outside time was spent digging and playing on the snow mountain, with lots of creativity being born. A mail service was created and mailboxes were added to the "rooms" in the Heartwood Hotel ❤. A few branches in the backyard were compared so we could remember some names of our Tree friends too.

After lunch, everyone explored games and free playtime while I had each student "show what they know" independently, as I worked through the outdoor assessment list. All students present did a fantastic job remembering with the tools they had to work with and have all shown growth, even Gordie who has been with us for a few weeks! This was our third check in of the year and I am very excited to see how students progress through the rest of the program.

Friday

Before circle, Gordie and I enjoyed some free time playing with the farm set, creating chicken coops and block buildings, and realized we could make rubix cubes from the snap blocks!

Our morning circle flowed very well, as Gordie remembered every step and guided the way through circle today, adding his excitement and spice to all aspects of our opening for the day.

After circle, we snacked and heard "Ten Ways To Hear Snow" and made a plan to see what we could hear on our hike today....and check out animal tracks.

After some free play, we learned how to build inside structures with materials we had in the room. We made some pretty cool creations in different ways. Gordie wanted to make sure we had toys to play with inside our structures and made everything very homey. We built many things today and played with number blocks and click blocks as Gordie was comparing numbers and patterns up to 20.

For outside time we noticed a Squirrel hanging out on the trunk of the Maple Tree! We learned later that Squirrel's eat tree bark from our animal tracks book. We also noticed two new holes in one of our Maple Trees were dripping sap!

We found many Squirrel tracks around the yard, and we were pretty sure we also found Skunk tracks! Yesterday there was a slight smell of Skunk too....however, no tracks led to a home in our yard.

We built outside too and enjoyed an extended outside time until we became hungry and our mittens were soaked through ❤

After lunch we read our Life Sized Animal Tracks book where we learned that Squirrel's eat bark, and a great many other things. We pulled out some animal bones, particularly the Beaver jaw to look at the looooooong front tooth, the Raccoon skull and the Coyote Skull to explore. We had lots of laughs learning about what groups of animals are called and comparing our fingers, hands and heads to the life sized animal tracks!

We cleaner up and packed up after our learning and played with the dollhouse until pick up time.

Looking forward to the excitement that comes next week as we will be planting seeds to start in our greenhouse and beginning to collect sap in the backyard to make Maple Syrup...along with our animal studies.