We had an eventful week in nature kindergarten, kicking off with our first session of Trail Buddies. With a goal of getting kids from other grade levels out in nature on a more regular basis, I asked the other teachers to consider being Trail Buddies with my kindergartners. I was happy to connect with a fourth grade this week for an inaugural session.
My class led the older students on a color hunt around different parts of the trail.
It was a treasure seeing the kids working together to search for colors. In the end, we combined our color collections and compared our findings.
We also started a unit on Plant & Animal Needs. We connected this to our outdoor classroom trees, learning a chant and song about the needs and parts of trees and plants. Of course, we had to head outside and put our learning to the test.
We may have even played along the way.
We climbed trees,
acted as nature waitresses,
and found a "new to the class" trail and even worked to clean it with stick brooms.
A few friends even found some hitchhiker seeds.
We all found some turkeys and a few of us even noticed. . .
some signs of fall.
Eventually we got back to work and used tree and plant parts to create a tree on the ground. Using bark pieces, sticks, bunches of leaves, and goldenrod stems, we created the leaves, branches, trunk, and roots of a tree.
It took a bit longer than expected as woolly bears were noticed, observed, shared, and released.
In our indoor classroom, we focused on identifying the needs if a plant in order to select the best plant for us to take care of inside. We decided on a fern. With rhyme practice fresh in our minds, we aptly named him Vern the Fern.
I repeated the needs chant I created all week long, so hopefully it sticks in their heads as the unit and year progress.
On to this weekend's Apple Harvest Festival at the Retzer Nature Center. I am proud to volunteer my time to represent our school's outdoor learning programming at an activity table and with our kindergarten scarecrow. It was completely designed and created by the nature kindergartners.
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