Blog | Fairywood Farm and Forest School

Living or Non-Living?

We've been talking about the difference between living and non-living things in the forest, and noticing that sometimes it's not so clear. We collected a worm, centipede, polypore mushroom, a piece of shale, grass, and fern, a green leaf, a brown leaf, and some tree nuts, and then we looked closely at each one and talked about whether it is living or non-living. We made some interesting discoveries. Some of the living things moved, but not all of them, and a green leaf is alive, until you pick it off the tree. A nut comes from a living tree and could grow into a new tree, but is it living? We ended the activity with more questions than answers.

Nature Notes

The leaves may be dying, but we noticed that the forest floor is still full of life as we peeled back bark, looked under leaves, and stomped around the water. River brought a book about animal tracks that inspired us to do some tracking. While the thick layer of leaves on the forest floor made it difficult to find tracks, we did manage to find some deer tracks in a muddy spot in the creek. We've been working on learning the difference between oak, maple, and beech leaf shapes. We've been enjoying sand and funnels, painting letters, wood blocks, and targets for stomp rockets. The kids gave a warm welcome to Jasper. We're excited to have him join forest school!

Halloween

We celebrated Halloween with costumes, our favorite spooky songs, spooky slime, popcorn on the stove, and face paint with dangling forest mirrors. We went on a hike and took in all of the beautiful fall colors. We found lots of puffballs and other mushrooms on our hike and talked about the spores that mushrooms send out to make more mushrooms.. We love the Crocodile Tree. We spent Thursday exploring all of the different waterfalls that formed in the little creek after the heavy rain. It was fun to send leaves and sticks floating down the stream. We were only able to take a couple pictures on Thursday since it was raining pretty hard for most of the morning.

The Big Oak Trees

The Flow of Sound, Light, Shapes and Color

Rules/Creeping Coyotes/Crystal Cheetahs

Living or Non-Living?

Nature Notes

Halloween