Welcome back everyone! The new year greeted us with some very interesting weather and some new students. Erik has joined us and has brought his vivid imagination and limitless ideas for games. Back from many adventures is Zachary, who has rejoined the program. Zachary and Erik are adjusting to the guidelines we have for safety and comfort, and it won’t be long before we are a well oiled machine – or train! Since we like to pretend we are a train when we walk to our classrooms! They are also playing well with others, inviting and being invited to join in building forts and laughing together.
Our train has tromped through slush and over lots of ice. There has been a slick icy path to the picnic pavilion where we meet every morning, and the pond was so frozen we could play on it. We also experienced a beautiful snowfall that contributed to the compact and enduring snow and ice covering the ground. The fresh layer of snow, meant we found many tracks to follow and we tried to guess who made them!
Erik putting up his first boundary cone! He decorated this maple stump with a boundary hat.
Sliding on the icy hill was great fun. They would position their legs if someone was in front of them on the hill so they wouldn’t hit them with their feet on the way down.
On our snowy day, the children spontaneously started sticking out their tongues to catch a cold, refreshing snow flake. Here’s Iris trying it out.
Exploring the pinecones. Torin started sorting them by size with Zachary’s help. This builds children’s sense of differentiating species and objects by their attributes.
When we slid around on the icy pond, the Seeds we’re intrigued by the cattails – or were they bull rushes? Or we’re they hockey sticks, or hot dogs or marshmallows? This marsh plant was a fun new organism to explore out on the pond.
Nova and Poppy are checking out the surface of the pond and using tools to scrape at it. This sensory play can be engaging for a long time especially if they have a theory or goal in mind. I believe they were trying to see beneath the snow to the water underneath!
Fin found a great perch in the forest to check out all that was going on. This new classroom is hard to access because the path is so slippery. The Seeds navigated it by sliding on their bums down hills, and climbing up on all fours to get up hills. A challenge that builds resilient, proud children!
Deer tracks! The Seeds can now positively identify the ungulates who make these 2 toed prints.
Brave faces on a day when the rain persisted so much so that by the end, all most of us could handle was huddling under the tarp reading stories and poems.
Lead by Torin, we found a new classroom with many climbing, building and creative challenges to engage us over the next months. Exploring is an important part of our program and it’s important that the children have some agency and sense of choice in where we go. In this way, they develop preferences based on their interests and pushing their boundaries for new challenges.
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