Title: Farewell Forest 

Week 31: May 21st and 23rd  

It’s the last week of Forest Playschool! It felt like yesterday meeting all of the students for the first time and understanding the day’s routine. And now, I am lucky to say I have made many meaningful connections with the students and the places we’ve been to. 

The final week’s animal-to-find is my personal favorite animal, the milk snake. After finding 27 of our Eastern milk snakes hidden in the backyard, the kids learned where the snake got its name: farmers from long ago used to find milk snakes in their barns and believed that the snakes were there to drink the cows’ milk. We now know that is untrue, and that milk snakes are found by cows because of the mice that those barns house. 

On Wednesday and Friday, we ventured down to Beaver Pond to play with the surrounding mud and rocks of the area. Some of the kids had fun building a bridge of sticks across one of the tiny streams. Others practiced skipping stones across the water. 

We later returned to the center for lunch before playing in the backyard one last time. We finished the day with our usual “Thank You Circle” where we share our favorite part of the day. But in addition to our favorite part of the day, we also shared our favorite part of the year. I shared that my favorite part of the year was tapping maple trees together, but it was very difficult to narrow it down to one moment. There were so many small moments such as finding a deer antler or hearing a student remember the name of a salamander that really stood out to me. 

Forest Playschool is a perfect mix of fun outside along with environmental education. And it’s great to me that the kids get to do this at such a young age where they are building core memories and absorbing so much information. It is always our goal at Audubon to teach people about the natural world while having a fun time doing so.