February Notes

With daytime temperatures warming up, we decided it was time to tap a maple tree. We drilled a hole in a tree at basecamp and hammered in a tap. It started dripping right away. We took turns catching drips on our tongue and then we hung a bag to collect it. We've been boiling the sap over our fires this past week, watching it slowly turn into syrup.

We set up some fun stations including a giant splatter paint mural and water ramps coming off of the rain barrel into the pond. We experimented with sending different objects down the waterfall, damming the flow of water, and adding other big loose parts to the ramps.

Out in the forest we discovered some grape vines that we could swing on, and lots of dry puffball mushrooms that release a dust cloud of spores when you squeeze them. We've also been making fairy homes, shelters for our stuffies, rock face paint, and mud moss faces.

We've been fascinated by decomposing wood that we find on the forest floor. We've been calling it "icky wood," and "mushy wood." We discovered that we can roll it into balls and squeeze out water, and we've enjoyed breaking it down further with our fingers or even a hammer.

The older kids in the Wednesday class wrote and performed a play for their classmates and parents. It was a comedy that had us all laughing! We also did more canoeing while we still had enough water in the pond.