Wednesday (the second day of school!) was our first day of Forest School. Every Wednesday, the Herons will spend a large part of the day outside. When we plan the day, we think of three different kinds of work. The first is "education outdoors" where we are doing something similar to what we'd be doing indoors but just in an outdoor setting. We spend the first half hour of Forest School reading. On beautiful days like this Wednesday, we take our books out and Remy and I circulate and conference with students about their reading, very similar to what we would do indoors. On days that aren't so nice, we'll have a group reading lesson where we read an article together or work on a particular reading strategy. Again, this is similar to work we'd do inside, just transferred outside.
We'll also do "outdoor education." We'll identify plants and animals, learn about ecosystems, make hypotheses and gather observations and data. This week, we learned about phenology, the study of seasonal changes. We split into teams and gathered data about a tree, a process which we'll repeat each week. We also recorded other observations of the plants and animals we saw. Together, we wrote a summary of our observations and selected a Heron to read our work for our podcast. Our podcast will play this Tuesday at 6:45 am Northern Community Radio KAXE (I am in contact with KYMN to have it broadcast here as well in the coming weeks.) You can click on that link to stream live on Tuesday morning or to get to the podcast in iTunes. I believe we are in the "Talk Back" section. Here's the a link to just our part of the podcast:
Download Pccs-phenology-2017-09-08
Finally, we will learn woods craft such as knot tying, fire building, foraging, lashing and other outdoor skills. Fifth graders will be encouraged to teach and support the fourth graders as well as extend their skills. I am excited to see what we can accomplish when half the class has more experience — last year, everything was pretty new to everyone!
I am very excited to be starting a new year of Forest School. As a teacher, I learned so much last year and found that the work we did outside was rich and memorable. I feel we came together as a class and built strong bonds that enabled more risk taking in our other subjects. The students learned how to persevere and they also became much more independent in their ability to prepare for the day, thinking through what they would need to wear and bring.
Here are the Herons gathering phenology observations including ripe grapes, two dead mice, over 20 admiral butterflies, two leopard frogs, 3 toads, lots of mushrooms (we need to get better at identifying those!) and much, much more.
We also got our blue books on Wednesday. The blue books are our tool for collecting almost all of our work throughout the year. The fifth graders couldn't believe how skinny the books are right now. They'll be bursting by May. We numbered all of the pages in the book and the fifth graders shared their wisdom for the care of blue books, including urging fourth graders to glue everything in right when you get it! Working on our blue books was the first opportunity students had to work with the other 4/5 classes. It was a lot of fun to see old friends reunited.
We began our mini-theme on advertising and persuasion this week, too. Remy led a great lesson about six different advertising techniques and students created short commercials using each technique. I never knew how much I needed a pencil sharpener until I watched their ads! By learning about advertising techniques, ad placement and how advertisers target and communicate to young people, we hope that students will be better equipped to be critical consumers, armed with an understanding and awareness of how advertising works. My apologies if your child was in the "humorous ad" group — I was chuckling so much I forgot to take a picture!
The Rookery 
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