Learning beyond the classroom...in a bakery!

The Forest Schoolers had been showing real interest in baking and cooking projects, both real and imaginary, at the Nature Center.  They have made mud pies in our "Mud Kitchen," and savored homemade sumac lemonade and applesauce, and bread cooked over an open fire.  In order to enrich their learning and offer a different perspective on food preparation, a field trip to La Brioche bakery in Montpelier was organized.  The learning opportunities abounded, as did the sugar! 

During a tour of the kitchen, students watched an
industrial bread-rolling machine in action. 
What awe and amazement!

Chef Kat shows us how to pipe frosting onto a cupcake. 

We each practiced frosting cupcakes and decorated
Butterfly and Turkey cupcakes with candies and pretzels. 

That's one cute turkey!

Here we are, with all of our decorated cupcakes! 

 The students were really grateful for their experience at La Brioche.  It will be interesting to see how this learning opportunity extends into our interests at Forest School.  What do you think we should bake?

Discovering Animal Homes

As the temperature dips down and the snow piles up, it is a good time to be thankful for having a warm and cozy home.  We celebrated animal homes a few weeks ago with Forest School, seeking out where animals lived.  We discovered that there are many creatures that have made their homes at the Nature Center!

After the leaves had fallen, we discovered many more bird nests than we had noticed earlier in the fall.

It is always fun to explore insect galls... we found baby flies living within the spherical balls on goldenrod stems.

 

The boxes that housed birds during summer have different residents now... we saw a mouse scurry out of this nest box after we opened it!

 

We watched quietly for several minutes hoping to see the mouse return to its nest.  

After finding animal homes in nature, we decided to make our own!  Here, a student shows off their mouse house, perched safely up in a tree.

More Sticks! More Math Outdoors!

This autumn I have spent hours cutting 2 foot long sticks in the forest behind my home. I also have a collection of sticks that are just a foot long and then a random assortment of sticks with twists and curves, just to shake it up a bit. With all these sticks piled in the back of my car it looks as if I am ready for a big camp fire. That's what most people think, but it's the exact opposite.
These are my "math sticks" or my "teaching sticks", not to get confused with plain old firewood! I have been bringing these to the schools I work with through the ECO program and have found many creative uses for them, primarily involving math.
We started out by asking students to make a shape where both ends of the sticks were touching the ends of other sticks. Each child got a stick and was invited one at a time to place their sticks in the growing shape. This took some coaching and guiding in the beginning, but these 1st and 2nd graders caught on quickly and came up with this sequence:

Do you see a triangle?

Triangles become a popular theme

The last stick is added

After the last stick was added the ideas started pouring out.
"It looks like a space ship!'
"No,..it looks kind of like the Ferris Wheel I rode on this summer!"
"If we moved that stick we could have a house or a,.."
With the children's observations teachers took the opportunity to introduce and use math language. Polygons, square, rectangle, angles, rhombus, nonagon, acute, obtuse, parallel,... and it went on and on! The children were eager to create there own pictures with their own rules. Soon 50 sticks was not nearly enough for these students. Especially when it comes to making a giant robot or telling the story of Lightning Heart.

The Evolving Robot

The story of Lightning Heart

On another day I arrived at school with 12 maple saplings strapped to the top of my car. The poles measured at about 8 feet  and I dumped them in a pile on the ball field. The children circled up around the poles wondering what we were about to do. My idea was to lug these to the top of the hill and create tripods across the landscape. Before we even started our work we just looked, and looked some more. With Mrs. C's help, we began to make out all sorts of shapes and shared with our neighbors what we saw.

Mrs. C  just loves math

Sharing what we see

Children climbed over the pile pointing out their shape and naming it with their partner. The challenge was to not name the same shape twice. These students worked hard with sustained focus and found so many polygons. And what a surprise! If you moved one pole ever so much,..the shapes changed!
Once bodies started to wriggle, we had the children grab the poles in true "pick-up-stick" style and carry them to the top of the hill. Who knew math would be so much physical work!
I think I see some team work happening,...

Here we go

                                                                                           Up the hill

Once everyone was to the top of the hill we tied on colorful pieces of cloth to the poles. Then began the problem solving around how to erect a tipi! The children were not the only challenged ones. The adults were figuring out right along side of them.

Many hands make light work

Whew! Is it snack time yet?

In the end, the children celebrated with snack and a story under their tipi's and wondering what else they could build with sticks in the forest. More sticks, more math please!

Thinking about standards and what we learned? Read the following standards included in our lesson Stick Shapes.
Common Core Math Standard:

CCSS.Math.Content.K.G.A.1 Describe objects in the environment using names of shapes, and describe the relative positions of these objects using terms such as above, below, beside, in front of, behind, and next to.

CCSS.Math.Content.K.G.A.2  Correctly name shapes regardless of their orientations or overall size.

CCSS.Math.Content.K.G.B.5 Model shapes in the world by building shapes from components (e.g., sticks and clay balls) and drawing shapes.

CCSS.Math.Content.K.G.B.6 Compose simple shapes to form larger shapes. For example, “Can you join these two triangles with full sides touching to make a rectangle?”

 A big thank you to Juliet Robertson and Creative Star Learning for the inspiration for these lessons! You can find her work here:  http://creativestarlearning.co.uk/

Loose parts magic

I've been looking for ways to enhance my students creativity and problem-solving skills in my outdoor-based preschool and kindergarden.  In my research amongst other blogs and educators, the hot way to do just that is through loose parts play.  Having collections of random objects, such as buckets, sticks, kitchen utensils, bowls, balls of different sizes, and planks and rounds of wood can be engineered and imagined into so many different things! 

I have to admit, I've used loose parts in the past.  I would meticulousely arrange them into little stations before the children arrived with my pre-determined ways that the children would use the objects.  There might be a music station, with an arrangement of buckets, bowls and utensils for banging, a building station with sticks, and a rolling station with balls of various sizes and halved PVC pipes.  But the children had little attention to give the parts and would wander between stations, and often resort to playing tag games. 

So I decided to change my tune.  I put out only one or two collections of loose parts materials, along with an art or craft project, to welcome the children as they arrived.  I also made clear that any of the materials at the side of the barn were available.  To my surprise, the ways that the children used the materials skyrocketed!  Here, two children making a delicious concoction in the "kitchen." 

 

Meanwhile, another two arrange wooden rounds and planks into their own obstacle course.   

 Just a few moments later, they shift their attention to building a tower. 

 They keep adding to it, and it's almost double the height of this child!

The preschoolers decided to use some planks and the picnic table as a makeshift slide. 

 With a little redirection, the used the plank of wood as a ramp for other objects, like this wooden round:

 a ping-pong ball,

 wooden block shapes

and round silver balls.  So much ingenuity!  And focus, too - look at the girl in the racoon mask, raptly watching the whole time.