With some fresh new snow on the ground what better way to spend the day than by playing in it! As our friends arrived we welcomed each other and engaged in some free snow play. It was actively precipitating when we first arrived and it was created this icy layer over the snow. We were having a blast making snow pancakes and seeing who could break off the largest piece of ice! This ice was very cool to look at because you could see all the individual snow/ice pieces mold together to create this fine layer!

Once we all arrived and had a chance to explore the snow we got moving! We enjoyed a quick snack as Sarah taught us some basics of tracking in the winter. This is a skill that we will be building on each week this winter! We learned about how understanding place is important, being able to see that a track is go up to a tree and then disappears, it must be an animal who can climb up trees. We talked about patterns, that there are four different types of moving patterns animals take and that’s a helpful tool to know what kind of animal track we are looking at. Last there is the actual print, the mold of the animal’s step that is left behind.

We hiked up to the Education Barn and spent the hike looking for tracks. We moved through the sugarbush, up to the Hemlock Swamp, across Peeper Pond, and then through the White Pine trail. On the White Pine Trail we stopped and saw some small tracks that were on top of the deep snow. They were tiny, so we knew it wasn’t a large animal and it seemed to have a line going through the middle of the track. We decided this line was that of the animal’s tail trailing behind. We followed the tracks to a small little tunnel and from all this information we learned it was most likely a white footed mouse!

Once up to the Barn we went SLEDDING! There were nice big snow piles and we made some wonderful sledding trails. Some of us even spent our time making snow sculptures too!

We took in all the snow had to give to us and ended out day eating lunch around a fire, listening to a story read by Sarah, and warming up with a cup of hot chocolate!