Outdoor March 26&27

Thursday

Today we began with our morning circle inside, moving our energy and feeling our energy ball creations. Our card choices were on point as always. Meditation time had students seeing very specific colours that had lots of accuracy for them that I shared that connected to the Core lesson on our energy this week.

After circle we had a snack and chatted rather than reading a story. Free play ensued afterward for a short period of time before we got outside for a 2.5 hour hike around the park. We spent time noticing new signs of Spring, checking out the water, climbing trees and playing in the park. We prepared for our Spring assessment by utilizing the walky talkies to communicate what we were looking for, kind of like a scavenger hunt:

-Dandelion

-Linden Trees

-Oak Trees

-Maple Trees

-Coltsfoot Flowers

-Cattails

-Self Heal

-Stellaria (Chickweed)

When we returned to the yard, everyone gathered their own sticks to build their first independent fires in spaces each student determined was safe and included flammable dry materials to catch the spark and light the fires. We lost the opportunity however to light our fires when the rain soaked all our dry materials. Next week we will be building fires again and will explore different ways of lighting them.

Back in the school we finished up boiling our sap while we ate our lunch. It is now a very dark maple syrup and everyone agreed it tastes delicious! We are looking forward to our pancake cook off the week of April 16 to celebrate our hard work and enjoy a delicious treat!

We played a game of flower family go fish (Go Flower!) together, then we pulled out the school hospital materials. Many sets of twins were born today to multiple students AND a set of 10 turtles were born from a human today too! Good thing it is creative play! Students had a blast caring for one another and looking after their babies. After our creative time inside, we resumed our sharing board practice (reflecting on the day and what we learned by sharing 3 things we gathered), then we returned outside after the rain stopped to play before pick up time.

Friday

This morning started with the dice game and some learning around addition tools. We learned that many numbers add up to make the numbers we needed and practiced checking our answers in a few different ways (counting dots on dice, using our fingers, logic of subitizing, and our addition helpers.

Circle was wonderful and our energy was BIG! After circle we enjoyed reading Acorn Was a Little Wild while snacking, and decided that on our hike we needed to collect an acorn from every Oak tree we could find so we could plant them to see how acorns turn into trees.

After snack we headed out for a long hike. It was a chilly morning, however we were able to climb a tree, collect 4 acorns (many were bug homes and eaten. We stopped at the creek and threw sticks in to see the float out the other side, had fun on the swings, then played at the climbers until we were ready to go back and warm up.

After our lunch, we played catch, a bit of hospital with babies and turtles, and tidied up our learning space. We completed our sharing board, reflecting on our day and set our acorns aside in the greenhouse to look at when the Earth outside has thawed. We ventured outside to okay for the end of the day.