Forest School Updates

The Herons have settled into our Forest School routine. Two weeks ago, we graphed a data set from the first junco sighting of the fall from 1952 to 1990 as recorded by Orwin Rustad, a naturalist in Rice County. We found the latest, earliest and mode of our the set (and learned how to turn month/day formats into numerical day of the year from 1 to 365…no small feat.)

It's hard to see here, but the Herons spontaneously inverted themselves on the plaza.

Using the plaza as a graph helps students visualize the data.

Last week, we played with the Deca Tree puzzle in which a tree has 10 trunks each of which has 10 branches each of which has 10 twigs each of which has 10 leaves. A forester cuts down one trunk, one branch, one twig and one leaf. How many leaves are left on the tree? This was a fun way to play with the base 10 system and the plaza afforded us room to sketch out possible solutions (no group ended up drawing all 10,000 leaves luckily!)

We also continued to practice our lashing skills, this time with sunflower stalks from Nat.