Hello to one and all, welcome back to the best nature program of all! Leave your layers behind, grab a hat, your favorite Halloween treat and join us for a day in the life of your Knee High Naturalist.
Still riding the excitement from Halloween, we were so excited to see our friends and tell them about our weekend! Tales from Spiderman, a shimmery anglerfish, Anna, a twisty tornado, Marshall and more filled our morning as we heard about trick-or-treating with our siblings, families and friends. We spent most of our morning meeting time chatting and catching up, relaxing in the soft pine needles as the sun came through the trees. Some of us examined an Ermine pelt, an empty snail shell and a feather from our Talking Tub. We took turns observing the female Black Widow spider Mr. Martin found this morning, gently turning her jar around to watch her as she spun silk and crawled up the invisible thread. We noticed that she had reddish-orange dots on her back and very long, dark legs! We raced to clean up our area and settled in to sing our Good Morning Song with our new spider in tow. We gently set her jar in the wagon and brought her along for snack time in the pavilion.
Knowing our routine like the back of our hands, we lined up our backpacks, unpacked our snacks and waited to wash our hands. It wasn’t long before we were all digging in, with apples, berries and cheese abound! We talked about our favorite color of cheese to eat (yellow, orange and white), the best fruits and what we wanted to do on such a beautiful day. After snack, some of us colored and some of scrambled rocks (our favorite place to play), enjoying the warm surfaces after a morning of sun! We learned how to climb new rocks, helped motivate each other and celebrated with each new rock climbed. Someone asked if we could climb the spider web in the playscape and this hatched our plan…
We talked about today’s objective during our hike; to find mushrooms, moss and flaky lichen to explore and learn about. We agreed that if we could find at least one example of each, we could end the day on the nature playscape! Happily, we set off on our hike, looking high and low for signs of our special plants. It wasn’t long until we saw fuzzy, green patches popping out from the leaves, inviting us to explore. We soon realized there were many little pockets of moss, not much bigger than our feet! Using gentle fingers, we touched them and noticed they were soft, squishy and a little dry. As we were crouched low, Mr. Martin saw a frog using its camouflage to blend in with the leaves! We took turns gently petting it before letting him crawl back under the leaves and continue our search.
Not much farther down the trail, we began to find little mushrooms with grey caps and white stems. Some were very big, some very very small—all of of them had thin white gills we ran our fingers down. They were very thin and wiggly! We found dried, orange and yellow mushrooms on fallen logs, a tough white mushroom that popped when we broke a piece of it and huge yellow mushrooms growing out of the pine needles! We even found a little bit of flaky lichen on a low tree branch and learned that it’s a mix of mushrooms and algae. As we investigated we discovered the perfect sticks for playing with, the perfect log for balancing and pine needles made for making nests with! If you were near by, you would have heard the ABC song echoing throughout the forest as we found sticks that looked like different letters.
We decided it was time to get moving to make sure we could have lots of warm, November nature play! We spent the last fifteen minutes transforming into spiders, castle builders, chefs and professional catchers. Many of us learned how to make cone sand castles and turn a magnifying glass into a shovel in a pinch. Some of us made new friends and worked together to bake muffins, pie or brew blueberry stew. Mr. Martin tossed big bouncy balls and one of our stuffies off the bridge for us to catch—we laughed and screamed with glee as we caught each item safely! As always, our time to go comes far too soon…we grabbed our wagon and went to meet our families with stories of day.
Thank you all for another wonderful day in the lives of your Knee High Naturalists! We look forward to seeing you next Monday when we learn about Wild Weather and signs of Winter.
