The slow coming of autumn has been such a pleasure! The warm sun filtered through the last of the leaves at our campsite today. The blue skies were very welcoming, as were everyone’s laughter and excitement.
The days are getting shorter, but our focus is getting stronger every week! The walk up the hill is getting easier every time; today we saw a big tree had fallen from the stormy winds blocking the trail and had fun trying to decide whether to go over it or under with our backpacks.
We have designed our camp days so that multiple choices are available for the children to participate in. This gives them ownership of their creations or practices, and we are able to connect with them in small groups. One group made little stick puppets using bark and simple crafting materials. We will be using these as we create our own puppet theater in the next few weeks. With a simple prompt, the children came up with very creative ways to make some characters. Some of the children starting working on crafting shafts for arrows. Each got a stalk of Red Osier Dogwood and a piece of shark flint to scrape the bark off. We will be continuing this project and making bows to go along with them as well.
Fire has been one of our favorite challenges and these young children are getting quite well-versed in the art of lighting fires using flint and steel. Congratulations to those who lit their very first fires today! Our main fire area was very busy today making acorn pancakes with the acorns that we cracked and ground several weeks ago. We mixed batter and flipped the pancakes on a griddle over the fire. We also made a delicious fruit compote to accompany them.
Before we relished the pancakes, we gave some gratitude to the oak trees by planting an acorn around our campsite in the hopes that more oak trees will grow. The group was quite silent while the pancakes were eaten—a good sign and a good meal. Acorn flour is extremely nutritious: It contains almost equal proportions of fat and protein. Most cultures around the world have been processing and eating them for millennia.
We used the cold leaching process to get all the tannins out, which means having a continuous flow of water washing over the ground acorns or letting the grind sit in water for 10 days or so and changing the water every day. Try this at home—it’s a wonderful way to connect to our local trees and allows us to understand more about the work that goes into the food we eat.