Have you noticed the chorus of critters singing in the swamps and marshes these days? All week long from our campsite we could hear the call of the peepers living on Fairy Island and the hiccup-like croak of the zombie Wood Frogs. This time of year is so exciting! The rain and next week’s warm weather mean the plants and buds are going to start popping! Our spring curriculum is guided by these changes, and we’ll be following the rhythm of the season with our upcoming projects and explorations including wild edibles, bird language, and amphibian life cycles, to name a few.
We kicked off our week with some camp caretaking projects. Our new site is the source of so much inspiration, and each week it has evolved based on the children’s new projects. This week we added a few more traps, the children helped build a dining/cooking table for the mud kitchen, and we cleared some invasive species. We worked together to fill the gator with wood chips, taking turns shoveling and spreading the mulch around our campsite—it looks fantastic! We appreciated the high spirit of teamwork to get this heavy lifting done. One of our philosophies is to give young kids opportunities to use tools like saws, hammers, and shovels and make a point to use real tools and not imitation tools. We find this helps to build a sense of safety and respect for tools and more investment in helping with projects. Not only that, it’s incredible for their motor skills and healthy risk-taking.
It has been a long time since we honed our fire-making skills and on Wednesday we revisited flint and steel. Our soon-to-be graduates had an additional challenge: building their own solo fire pit where they will do more advanced challenges and skill through the semester. Each child has a chance to choose a spot in the buckhorn forest and got to work cleaning the ground, collecting stones, creating a fire circle, and sprucing up their sites. We will work towards an advanced 3-match challenge at the end of the semester.
Speaking of fire, these kids have been so drawn to burning sticks and writing signs with charcoal lately. We decided to do a dedicated charcoal pencil project this week. We drew inspiration from an amazing book called The Organic Artist for Kids by Nick Neddo. On Thursday, we talked about what charcoal has historically been used for: ancient practices of cave drawings and what types of wood work best for pencils. These wood species are grapevine, willow and pine.
We played a game of Steal the Bacon where children had to properly identify the plant and run it back to their team. It was a hit! Not only that, a great way for children to really learn the plants, which came in handy when we went to identify and harvest them later in the day. Children first carved off the bark using knives and we popped them into a metal tin that we made into a kiln. We then had a fire challenge to build a hot fire to cook the kiln. As the fire burned bright with the kiln inside, we gathered around for lunch and a round of games.
Our week ended with one of the most profound and beautiful closing circles where children had an opportunity to honor their friends by gifting them a Respect Token. So many of the honoring had to do with a friend feeling seen, listened to and taken care of. Some of the things honored were:
- Thank you for helping me find a place to be in the group
- For helping me share how to play together
- I like when you listened to me
—JJ, Raei, and the Woolly Bear team
April 8, 2022