By Rae Bronenkant

It’s that wonderful time of year when things are muddy and icy at the same time…You can’t really ski or hike; but at Forest Playschool we made the most of it.

We started our day at Forest Camp, it was a move on our hands and knees kind of day. I enjoyed watching all of them interact and play together. They were teaching each other how to climb trees (with my close watch), as always they all hopped on the train (... the teepee), and there were way too many tasty baked goods being made.

The big plan for the day was to head down below to collect sap! Once we got down below I asked if they wanted to play a game, the game is to collect all of the hidden gallon milk jugs in the woods to figure out how many gallons of sap make one gallon of syrup. We found almost all of them, when one was spotted, deep in the center of a hollow log. I stood back and watched as they all slowly flocked to this problem and worked together to try and save this trapped jug. Someone tried to climb in, there were sticks used from all angles and it was an opportunity to see each of them and their leadership style, and amazingly they all were leaders at some point during this extraction!

We noticed that we were running out of time and had to run up the hill to eat lunch. I promised them sap collecting next time!