With Pumpkins for a Purpose behind us, the class spent less time planning and more time exploring this week.
We kicked off our week of exploration by sharing our trail and outdoor classroom with Children's Hospital. We were happy to meet a representative from the hospital. We watched our
favorite Children's Hospital video with her, presented her with the neatly $900 made form our pumpkin sale and learned about how that money would be used. We wrapped up with a hike and some natural play.
We also met with our fourth grade Trail Buddies this week. After collecting natural materials from around the trail, we reviewed the parts of a tree and why each part was needed before constructing our own tree collaboratively with a fourth grade peer.
This week also brought our first visit to one of our favorite places: The Retzer Nature Center. Embarking on this yearlong adventure with the amazing Retzer team is always a highlight and this trip was no exception.
We traveled around the trails working on collections of nature, mainly seeds, nuts, and leaves.
We enjoyed hiking through the prairie and checking out the new boardwalk shadowing the woodland stream.
After lunch and some indoor exploration, we began our quarterly visit to the vista for our class picture and continued nature discoveries.
Back at Woodside's Timberwolf Trail, our collecting continued. With our Fall Celebration just a few days away, we continued adding to our leaf pile and checking on the decomposing puffball.
We also completed some acorn addition, dissected the decorative corn stalks to find some corn treats for our animal friends, and used our nature notebooks to document our outdoor adventures.
With our Science focus on habitats, we investigated the fallen tree to determine its importance to the ecosystem of the area. We found that while it may be dead, it certainly supported life, including bugs, chipmunks, birds, and fungi.
The class learned our new Ecosystem Chant and even started the process of learning about HAM (Hibernate, Activate, Migrate) as we learned about how animals need to be decision-makers to meet their need.
We wrapped up a week of habitats by cleaning our and comparing several birdboxes around the trail. This helped us understand how different animals look for different things in their homes.
We were also enthusiastic about our new information case, provided through a generous grant from The Waukesha County Community Foundation.
What will next week bring? We shall see, but I guarantee this. . .we will LOVE it!
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