Saplings Core Sept 15-17

Monday

Today we began our morning circle with the teaching of Respect. The teaching is all about respecting ourselves first AND recognizing that ALL of creation deserves respect. We discussed how trees, plants and other forest animals are really our family, just like our school family. Every living thing deserves respect. The statement that we say each day is:

I honour the beauty and basic rights of myself and all living things.

Morning exercises were full of cursive practice, writing our descriptions for our crystal grids, silent reading and Cribbage Wars.

After lunch, we finished our Cribbage wars game, then moved outside to harvest some plant friends for some upcoming projects. Today's foraging was for Coltsfoot, Self Heal, Plantain (narrow and broad leaf), plantain seeds, and Elderberry. We also found our first very beautiful fall leaf that we brought back for a friend who loves them. We also found a Wooly Bear Caterpillar that Corbin moved off the trail to safety so he wouldn't get stepped on.

Tuesday

We spent the morning working through our morning activities. Big emotions were coming up, and the Zen room was in full swing. We learned today that everyone gets to do what they need to do.

After lunch, and a good game of UNO, we cleaned and removed Elderberries from stems, and discussed our foraged items, named them and shared more about the uses we were planning for them.

We hiked to check out our foraging spaces from yesterday. Corbin noticed a Golden Globe Spider egg sack in amongst the Goldenrod. We experienced the Coltsfoot patch and found additional areas where we can harvest Plantain and our secret ingredient for our after bite oil infusion. We ended up in the creek at a different bridge and had a beautiful close encounter with a Mama Mallard and her 3 almost grown babies. In our travels we found a really cool spot to build a fort, Rose Hips, Bull Rushes (that were all fluffed out), Wild Grapes, Prickly Pear, and Jewelweed.

We talked about seeds on our hike, as we noticed that the Bull Rushes as they fluffed out there were seeds attached to the fluff. When we found the Jewelweed, we touched the seed pods and they exploded in a brilliant way! We all foraged and ate Apples this afternoon too!

The coolest conjoined Apples we ever did see!

Wednesday

We experienced a beautiful Equinox Ceremony and Drum Birthing this morning!! We sang and drummed and hooted and hollered. We learned about equal light and dark and discussed the changes coming and Autumn.

Welcome to our drum community Connor, Bodhi, Mila and Pam!! Pam is one of our supply teachers who is currently enrolled in our Becoming An Educator course. For pictures of the ceremony, please have a peek at the Sprout's Weekly Reflection.

After ceremony, we came back to the classroom, read the introduction of Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults. We learned about RECIPROCITY today. We will move through this book (Teacher reading and discussing as a group) throughout our time between now and Winter Solstice.

After our introduction to the book we rolled our dice and spent the remainder of the morning learning about one another based on the prompts on the dice.

Recess was a blast, as the Sprouts put on epic performances for me!!

Back in the classroom for the afternoon, we focused on our goal of completing our Crystal Grids. Everyone was able to complete theirs today!! For this lesson, we learned how to use pendulums. Students determined their yes and no responses, then we utilized the pendulums to identify if the crystals we chose for our grids were clear of all energies but their own. After this, asked each Crystal (or group of same Crystals) what type of clearing they would need (Salt, Water, Sage or Selenite), and noticed the nuances in how the pendulums moved. Big responses for their preferred clearing medium, small responses for ways that work, but they do not prefer.

Once the chosen Crystals were cleared (we checked with the pendulums to confirm), we asked the Crystals if we could program them with our intentions for our grids and received resounding yeses. We held the crystals in our hands and provided our instructions for them based on our grids and voila! We hot glued them carefully in their spaces on our grids and they all went home.

The very end of the day was filled with clean up and yahtzee, then some outside time to play before home time.

Create the best weekend <3