Hello one and all, welcome back to the best nature program of all! Zip up your jackets, grab your kite and tag along for a wild and windy day in the lives of your Knee High Naturalists.
The wind eagerly greeted us this morning, blowing in our hair, sending leaves dancing through the sky and waking us up with a little chill on our skin. Even though it was windy today, it was still pretty warm and we made sure to enjoy every last bit of it before the first snowflakes fly! We did find more bugs than usual this morning, lots of roly-poly’s, sow bugs (their very similar cousins), a few worms, tiny millipedes and even an ear wig sleeping peacefully inside a milkweed pod. As we explored, we shared stories about Halloween, our costumes and all of the fun treats we got! We finally decided it was time to start class so we raced to pick up our favorite colored cones and settled in for our Good Morning song. We packed up our bags and raced to the pavilion, helping each other push and pull the wagon with lightning speed!
Once in the pavilion, we found the warmest, sunniest spot and took off a few layers before digging in. We took a vote and decided we wanted to read two books, See You in Spring by Carol Pugliano-Martin and Changing Weather by Margie Burton, Cathy French and Tammy Jones. We talked about the different ways animals adapt to survive in winter like migration and hibernation. We also talked about our favorite types of weather to play in—a lot of love to play in the rain and build snowpeople in the winter. Some of us like to fly kites in windy weather like today and some of us like to watch lightning during summer storms. We also wonder why thundersnow is not common and why we usually on hear thunder and see lightning during the summer—we’re full of fantastic questions! After snack, we played on the rocks, had fun tossing and kicking a ball around and then harvested milkweed seeds to toss into the wind from the top of the rocks. We had so much fun watching all of the seeds and fluff fly away!
Finally, we gathered to talk about all sorts of wild weather! We started by talking about our weather today and concluded that it was partly cloudy, very windy and a little cold. We learned that if we can’t see the stars or moon at night, that means there are clouds in the sky and the weather is going to change. We also learned that fog is just ground clouds! We learned a cloud song and got to take our cloud identifiers for a spin, matching the clouds we saw in the sky to the ones on our ID sheets. We all agreed that we saw cumulus clouds today. These look like big, fluffy cotton balls and mean good weather! We talked about the other clouds we’ve seen before and what they mean for weather to come. We ended our lesson by learning that clouds are made of water and when they get too heavy, they release rain or snow! We grabbed our favorite cones and set off for today’s adventure.
We decided to head to the climbing tree because we haven’t visited it in quite a while. Along the way, we stopped to brush any unwanted hitch hikers off our shoes and looked around for the pumpkin pieces we tossed into the forest last week. We found one half of a pumpkin and were disappointed at first…until we realized that all of its seeds were missing! We found empty husks of the missing seeds on the other side of the tree and noticed tiny little pumpkin crumbs on the forest floor nearby. We concluded that someone had definitely been snacking on our squash, but we aren’t sure who…we’ll continue our investigation as the weeks go on! Knowing the trails now, we all ran to our our favorite outdoor classroom and made quick work of climbing the tree and fort construction. We found a teeny, tiny worm during construction and got a crash course in making tiny little shelters from one of our friends. They showed us how to push sticks into the ground so they’re leaning over and how to cover them with pine needles to make a cozy little cave—we had so much fun making our own little forts! All too soon, it was time for us to head back so we packed up our gear and hit the trail to go home.
Thank you all for another wonderful and wild week in the lives of your Knee High Naturalists! We look forward to seeing you all next time when we learn about Nature’s Engineers!
