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?

Build an Adventure in Your Forest

This spring students at East Montpelier Elementary School launched the beginning of our most popular ECO lesson to date.  These kindergarten and first graders at EMES were really looking to put their big creative energy to use. We presented the students with a wide variety of tools and inclusions. If you had ropes, buckets, carabiners, and a pulley what could you do? These students jumped in with ideas and focus that turned into The ECO Carnival. Ropes were soon being weaved between trees and buckets hung from various heights. By paying a carnival designer an American Beech leaf,  you could choose from a selection of forest grown games.  Your prize for landing a snowball in a moving bucket? Two large White Pine branches decorated with green twine. A trophy of sorts!

In another, much quieter area of the forest, students pounded charcoal and elderberries in The Pencil Store. Other children silently carved red osier and striped maple branches into pencils with a tool of choice, the Lancashire Potato Peeler.  Paper and journals were brought out of backpacks and soon students were writing letters and secret messages with their new handcrafted pencils with elderberry ink. Deliveries were made by messengers throughout the forest.  Who wants to buy a pencil at The Pencil Store?
 

The Pencil Store is open!

Making charcoal ink

 

Composing a letter

 

 Thanks to the children at EMES we have been wrapping our year in area schools by offering the children “workshop time” in the forest during ECO. We can easily align all the learning that was happening with our new Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards. Force and motion being a very popular one!
Although, that’s not what the teachers were noticing first about their students highly focused participation during these workshop times. The option of choice, self discovery, innovation, trial and error, communication and cooperation with peers,…the list goes on.  Many amazing and creative ideas and projects have sprouted up from this time. A life size Bald Eagle nest, obstacle courses made from willow whips, a chairlift for mice, rope swings, kid sized zip lines and you can’t have a workshop without being properly fed. Dandelion Pancakes anyone?

Dandelion Blossoms for Cooking

Ken makes the best pancakes EVER!

 

Around the fire, we are cooking and relaxing.


 

Forest School farm field trip

 

We were lucky enough to visit a Forest Schooler's family's farm today!  Located just up the road from the NBNC, we spent the morning exploring forests, ponds and streams, helping with farm chores and enjoying the humid spring weather (thankfully the thunderstorms held off!)

 

Here are some happy explorers!

 

We found some porquipine quills outside a den.  Did you know porqupines poop on their front stoops?



 

Who knew there was a cave that could fit the whole Forest School, and even some siblings?!

After exploring the forest, we helped with farm chores.  First we scrubbed water buckets for the ducks...

 

Then we collected chicken and duck eggs!

 

Afterwards, we played with the baby goats.

 

And had a peaceful time observing ducks.

Can you find the toad eggs? 

 

 

Here's a boat, made with woven ferns.

 

What a day it was!  So much fun learning happens at a farm.

 

Poems by the river

Poems are big these days.  Montpelier's annual Poem City just wrapped up its amazing score of events, readings and poems in almost every storefront.  Recently, Vermont Public Radio highlighted poetry's ability to help kids learn to read.  (Click here for the full article.)  Poems have an ability to capture simple, sweet moments and complicated emotion in touching ways, and educators are tapping into this writing form with their students. 

We at Forest School are doing just that.  During the past two weeks of near-summer temps and sunshine, we Forest Schoolers have been taken refuge under a shady bridge on the North Branch of the Winooski River (our Nature Center's namesake!).  In between bouts of searching for shimmering rocks and sneaking up on crayfish and wood frogs, we wrote some poems ourselves!  Here are a few of our creations:

River Haiku, by SP
Flowing and growing
Is nice to put your feet in
Ducks love it so much

It's Low, by OS
And on the other side it's high
It's really slow
And its a bit warmer than last time
The sun hits it and it sparkles
It wooshes across to the other side
And the other side is really high
It's sandy and rocky
Can you guess who I am?
The river!

The River, by SP, OS, and LV
Flowing, gurgling and pretty designs
Cool and refreshing
Wooshing and rushing
Home for many creatures
Rippling and rocky, always flowing
It's big and long
It almost never ends
You can't swim in it because it's too cold
Music to my ears
My ducks would love to swim in it
When you step in the sand over and over,
you have to go in the water over and over

(Apologies for the lack of pictures - they'll be coming soon!!)

Why I build fires.

Each day we meet for Forest School, we make a fire.  It is a warm and welcoming ritual in the snowy, deep winter of central Vermont.  

 

But I have to admit, I wasn't always so keen on having a fire.  The pre-fire logistics of gathering kindling, requesting firewood donations from parents, checking the weather forecasts for wind and snow and rain all seemed too daunting.  Plus, with my poor circulation, the thought of having to take off my expedition-style mountaineering mittens to start a fire seemed worse than sitting for a few hours without a fire!  I would relegate the fire responsibility to my co-leader and supervise free play and tell stories instead. 

But earlier this week, when my co-teacher offered to join the group for free play, I somewhat ambivalently accepted the role of "Fire Tender."  It was a relatively warm day for mid-February (mid-20 degrees F) and Zach had already started the fire.  All I had to do was add more wood and stir the coals when the fire started to dwindle.  The crackling fire and the sounds of children laughing and shouting in play was comforting and I found a pleasant rhythm to my task.  I came to appreciate that task of tending fire really requires one to cultivate tenderness - attentive, patient, alert and observant.  In essence, being with the fire was quite similar to how I strive to be with my students.  The hour of tending fire passed surprisingly quickly, interspersed by visits from children to warm their hands, dry their mittens and share an interesting observation, and there was a welcoming fire for our end of the day Thanksgiving circle and closing rituals.  

This afternoon was a pivotal moment for me.  I used to skeptically approach fires as something too "crunchy" for me and a practice that was too time consuming to meld with my teaching style.  But I have really come to appreciate the immeasurable value of teaching with a fire.  

After going over some basic safety expectations with your fire guests, the fire is an amazing management tool.   The students naturally gravitate towards it, they are focused and thoughtful around it.  We eat lunch around it, share stories while gazing into its depths, and have it as a gathering point to return to after play and exploration.  

There are countless science lessons that flow from it. Hello, states of matter!  Not to mention cooking, change over time, social studies, tool use, and the list goes on.  It is fun to see what these kindergarten and first grade students know about fire and what preconceptions they have about how things burn and what the difference is between steam and smoke.  I am lucky enough to have colleagues with myriads of experience teaching with fire and who have created lessons involving safe practices with fire.

Plus, the very act of gathering around a fire is powerful and is something that has been practiced for centuries. In a culture that is ever-more focused on deriving pleasure from staring at screens, there is something peacefully rejuvenating that happens when you're staring into a fire with beloved students and colleagues. 

Fiber fun with Forest School

When the late January chills dip into the single digits, the Forest Schoolers spend a little less time in the forests and fields and spend a little more time indoors exploring other crafts and projects. We are in the midst of a fiber unit right now, and we have experimented with lots of fiber crafts over the past few weeks.  On the first day of our unit, we felt the fiber, examined it under magnifying lenses, and picked through Alpaca fiber which was donated by Melissa and Chris Pierce at North Branch Alpaca Farm. What a mess we made! 

 

 

 

 A guest speaker showed us how to use a drum carder.  We used the clean, long pieces of fiber to card into rovings.  

These rovings can be used for many things, including pretend beards,

 

 and they can be spun into yarn.

 

On another day, we made beautiful needle-felted works of art from colorful, dyed rovings!

 

 

Most recently, we used yarn to weave little bags.  We started with these items:

 

 

  and we practiced weaving with our families 

We ate our lunches by the fire and read one of many fiber-themed books, A New Coat for Anna, by Harriet Ziefert. 

 

Afterwards, we explored a frozen swamp and found some incredible ice formations! 

 

 

The day ended by listening to the gentle swishing of ice along the river bank.  It was a surprsing, unexpected sound and a lovely way to end an enriching day. 

 

 

 

 

 

Forest School, in the winter

Forest School looks and feels much different in the middle of January than it did in early September.  For one, snow coating the landscape provides opportunities for tranquil sights.  And with the chilly temperatures, frozen water balloons with food coloring make beautiful frozen globes throughout the day.

 These globes were mysterious, magical-looking and provided fodder for lots of imaginary play.  In this game of "Coyotes and Voles," the colored spheres became imaginary vole food!  The children in the middle of the circle were in their vole den and the people on the outside sphere were the coyotes, waiting to "eat" them, by tagging them, of course, as they were trying to scrounge for food.  It's amazing how something as simple as frozen colored water can spur creativity and naturalist knowledge in kindergarteners and first graders.

After an extensive game session, we visited the Christmas tree maze that was being set up for the Ice on Fire festival this weekend.  We were lucky enough to see a Red Tailed Hawk circling above, too!

This is Christmas tree maze from afar.  Community members drop their Christmas trees at the North Branch Nature Center and talented Americorps volunteers set up the aromatic maze for children and adults, alike, to enjoy leading up to the Ice on Fire festival.  

We tucked into the barn for a snack and our morning circle before heading out to our base camp.  On our way, we searched for Nature's Paintbrushes and used them to create patterns and write in the snow.   Hello, literacy!  

On our way to base camp...

Sliding down the hill at our base camp.  Despite the cold temperatures, the children walked, played, slid, imagined and stayed warm and engaged during our 5 hour outing.  Let's see what next week's temperatures bring!

Whittling with Kids

The Forest School students have had a super fun time honing their whittling skills this fall using potato peelers.  As soon as the single-pivot potato peelers were introduced, these kindergarten and first graders enthusiastically took to experimenting with whittling:

 

They made crafts, like this God's eye in a homemade frame:

 

 

With so many beautiful goods created over the course of a few weeks, everyone wanted to create a store to sell their wares!  A name was voted on, which was the "Fire Whittlers" and friends and family were invited to shop during the last Forest School session before the holiday break.  Here are the students making price tags for their goods:

 

When the parents arrived, they were instructed how to "Fox-walk" up to our basecamp:

 

 

Here are our guests arriving through the forest: 

 

One vendor selling a fishing pole:

 

We finished off the afternoon with a Thanksgiving circle, where parents, grandparents, students, North Branch staff and friends shared one thing that they were thankful for.  It was a beautiful afternoon with lots of wonderful learning that took place!