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LEEK FEST!

This week we celebrated Leek Fest! What a plant this is! Its delicious flavors of garlic and onions and its abundant display each Spring make this one of our favorites.

In Wild Ways, students chopped up some freshly harvested leeks (also known as ramps) to add to mason jars full of whipping cream for some competitive butter churning! In the Great Butter Battle, two teams competed to see which could produce leek butter the fastest. Each team circled up and passed the jar of cream and leeks, shaking it with every ounce of their being until delicious butter was made!

Sunshine at the Cobble

It was a beautiful spring day at Bart’s Cobble and both Cobblers groups enjoyed walking through the changing landscape. The morning was filled with laughter and games in the sunny and warm fields. When it was time to go into the forest, one group of explorers went up Hurlbert Hill and the other made their way down by the Housatonic River. Each group discovering the blooming Spring Ephemerals and exploring the wonders of the Cobble.

WilD Work

Today marked the start of some very important preparation and projects for Wild Ways. Before we know it, we will be camping out at the end of the semester and there is work to be done! Today both groups headed off to start work on lean-to shelters to use as a skills and hangout spot during our overnight. The Coyotes even decided to go find a brand new spot on a less explored piece of land to make a new site. The Bobcats already have uprights in the ground and are almost ready to start adding shingles. The Coyotes have all of the materials gathered and prepared and are ready to set it all up next week.

Exploring and Gathering

To begin our Saturday Explorers day, we gathered together in the big field and shared, with a partner, a story or something we saw, heard or felt, from nature, over the past month. Making time and space for this kind of sharing builds friendships and encourages the kids to make more stories and share those. Thus, the nature connection cycle continues.

Guilds, Week 3

We wrapped up our three-week Guilds project this week. It was great to see all that each small group accomplished in their time together. It’s such a gift to be working in this kind of learning environment! We learn, we share, and we learn from each other’s stories.

GUilds, Week 2

This was Week 2 of our Guilds, with the morning spent focusing in on our chosen subject. In the FOREST Minks group, arrows were completed and launched! The other group engaged in a race to build the finest fire, and spent time practicing carving fine “feather thin” wood curls around their campfires for kindling. In the River Otters group, the Craft Extravaganza guild worked on nature mobiles, utilizing many useful items found in nature. They learned about Sweet Birch and Honeysuckle, talked about responsible harvesting and the Rule of Three (taking some for humans, leaving some for the plants and some for the animals).

The GUILDS BEGIN

This week, in all three homeschool programs, we launched our first morning of our three-week Guilds project. What’s a guild? It’s a choice-based group in which students choose a craft to focus on. Each group chose between two options to dive deep in the learning process.

FOREST Maple Fest

Today was maple fest! Everybody spent the morning together in the field while the evaporator boiled away. We played games as folks rolled in and when we had all arrived we circled up around the boiling sap. Josh told us a story of when syrup flowed straight from the trees, no boiling necessary. In the story, the people grew lazy and spent all their time on their backs, letting syrup drip into their mouths.

Tapping the MAPles

Our Wild Ways reunion today was so sweet. As folks trickled in and said their hellos, they inspected the beauty of a recently found dead fox, admiring its coat and heavily furred paws and discussing its lifeways. There was also a station to experiment with the process of turning stones into usable sharp cutting tools, one of humankind’s oldest crafts, which were later used in our craft of the day—Maple Spiles.

SKating and SkinkING

Today was a truly wonderful day of the Cobblers program, full of unexpected turns the whole way. We opened the morning with some gratitude, some stretching, and a good old-fashioned game of Duck-Duck-Goose! Then we headed out to the field for some games. As we were hiking across the field, we noticed that the snow had a few different layers—a fluffy white surface layer, a harder crunchy middle layer, and a base of ice. Thinking quickly, the Grey Foxes sought the lowest part of the field where water might pool and found a huge frozen puddle, more like the size of a small pond. They cleared off the freshly fallen snow and got to slipping around on the ice and challenging each other to slide the farthest and the fastest.