Welcome November! We started our chilly day looking at leaves, we had some cards and our task was to find matches of the leaves around the woods of Audubon. Some matches were hemlock, basswood, Red Maple, Oak, etc. We found 10 of the 16 leaves!
During morning meeting, we discussed what our November conservation action task would be. Last month we clean out the bird houses for the spring. After talking through some ideas, we landed on cleaning up our trails during our next meeting. We will make sure our sugarbush trails and clean and clear for all animals and people who use them. To get warm after snack we went down to the field and played some Park Ranger. It slowly devolved because some playgroup kids wanted to join in and play chase.
Today we spend the morning and afternoon at Beaver Pond doing two different activities. The first in the morning was spending time playing, and spelling with rocks! We worked together to spell our Forest Classroom. We also looked for tracks and found some raccoon tracks in the mud!
In the afternoon we went back to the pond and worked together to make fire! First we practiced lighting matches and then setting a cotton ball on fire. Once we felt comfortable with that, we moved on to talking about fire structures and what a fire needs to stay alive, air, fuel, and heat. We gathered sticks in the woods and worked in our small groups to design our fires in tins. Then once Truman and I make sure the fire structures seemed okay we gave the groups matches and watched them work through lighting their sticks on fire. Each group of their fires going and kept them going too! Maybe down the line we will learn other methods of how to make fire beyond using a match!
In the afternoon we enjoyed some free explore time, afternoon snack and ended with journaling at our sit spots. It was such a fun way to spend our Monday!
