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a Day of Honoring

This week we came together in honor of Indigenous People’s Day. We listened to the story of the Golden Flower that produced the pumpkin that brought water to the Earth, and provided the Taino people with everything they needed to sustain life.

Apples & salmon, Mosquitoes & Bears

It was the most beautiful fall day and our new Thursday Roly-Polies Forest Kindergarten group had a wonderful day in the sunny field and cool streams at Daley Road!

The day began with games and animal movements. After some snack, we got chopping and splicing apples for the apple press. With four 5-gallon buckets of apples, we started to press and squeeze all the juice we possibly could. It was delicious!

The Woolly Bears group also made apple juice this week! The group learned how to safely cut, using their bear claws, and we had not a single cut! Hooray! Cider never tasted so good, after we practiced a mindfulness exercise to slow down and seriously enjoy every drop.

wonderful Worms

Have you ever serenaded a worm? Neither had we until we joined a children’s worm rock band! After this week with the Woolly Bears, we will truly never look at a worm the same way.

Unlike European earthworms, which are also an introduced species (nearly all worms are non-native to North America!), these jumping worms are bigger, wrigglier, have an iridescent sheen but most notably, they often pop off part of their body when picked up!

Learning the Ways of the Forest

What wonder and joy to be with the children in the forest on these warm, summer-like days this week! Everyone has taken on our routines with grace and ease and friendships are already being created.

We started our week by taking it very slow, introducing the many steps and transitions we have throughout the day. They feel strange and new at first to our newest friends, but by the end of the week we already saw how everyone was able to remember taking care of themselves and their things.

Every morning after circle, we open our door to the forest with a golden key. Each child gets a turn to do so and announces respectfully, from our hearts, that we are there, ready to play!

Snakes and Worms and Bats and things

We started our Forest K day at the Cobble in the field hopping around like frogs, creeping around like snakes and inch worms and avoiding being eaten by bats (Bats and Moths Game).

We enjoyed the morning sunshine doing snack and blew dandelion seeds in the wind. We couldn’t be more comfortable at our forest site! The leaves have all filled in on the sugar maples and our site is comfy and shady.

Friends

This semester we have seen so many sweet friendships bud, bloom and bring confidence, a sense of belonging and true happiness to so many of your children. Learning how to communicate with peers, how to navigate conflict, speak up, initiate play, integrate into a group or find our voice within the circle are no small things.

Celebrating the wild Leek

The Forest Kindergarteners started off their week with a ramp rescue mission! We transplanted ramps, also known as wild leeks, moving them from a nearby area that is undergoing logging to a safe new home. With care and tenderness, the children tucked the plants into their new home, gingerly handling their bunny ear leaves and lovingly watering their roots. Not far away we found false hellebore, a look-alike of ramps and explored ways to ID plants. We hope that ramps can be a gateway plant to forming a deep love of all plants—edible, delicious and all those in between!

Paint and Camouflage

“Thank you, Mother Nature for this wonderful playground.” Those words from one of our Woolly Bears are so simple, yet so powerful! What an acknowledgement of the bounty of the world.

The children found purpose and focus this week in creating different kinds of pigments from rocks, clay, and spices to paint and use for camouflage. Pounding stones and experimenting with different binding agents, such as honey or dish soap, created a table full of creativity, art, problem solving, and turn taking.

Springtime Streams

It’s hard to believe we are already at the halfway point of our semester. We have noticed a spring fever moving through all of us with symptoms include high energy, joy and timelessness! Luckily we’ve found a cure: bare feet, stream splashing, salamander searching, and plenty of mud baths!

‘My tree told me, I love you’

We all received warm welcomes this week as the Woolly Bear Forest Kindergarteners gathered once again for a new session. To think that this time last year, we were gearing up for a major change in all of our lives, it really is amazing how far we have come. Masks are now second nature, and we have adapted, as all creatures do, to hardships and changes in their environment. One thing that has stayed constant are the friendships made. What a joy it was to see friends reunite, sawing wood together, hauling rocks, using friendship sticks, and listening to each other’s stories.