Hello to one and all, welcome back to the best nature program of all! Pull on your warmest layers, grab your coziest hat and tag along for a day in the life of your Knee High Naturalists.
A very chilly wind welcomed us to class this morning, making us shiver and zip up our jackets even further! As chilly as we felt, we knew the best way to stay warm was to keep our bodies moving. Since we already knew we were going to become Olympians today, we decided to have Ms. Jenn help us design our very own obstacle course using snow paint! We made a blue starting line with a yellow, orange and red trail that we had to walk down and hop over. This led into an orange hopscotch course with numbers 1 through 6, we counted as we hopped in each square. To finish off our obstacle, we had purple markers we hopped to like bunnies! Once we had all gone through the obstacle course, we decided it was time for a morning meeting—we were feeling hungry! We sang together, getting louder with every class, before we reviewed our day and hit the trail. We have a very safety conscious friend who reminds us to pull the wagon slowly so no one gets their toes run over and they give us extra oomphs, too.
Once in the pavilion, we lined up our backpacks, took off our mittens and waited in the warm bathroom while we took turn washing our hands. With it being cold and windy today, Ms. Jenn brought us all our own hand warmers to use while we ate snack and read our books. Today, we voted to read Home For a Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown and Wake Up, Sleepy Bear! by Christine Morton-Shaw and Greg Shaw. Our favorite book was Wake Up, Sleepy Bear! It had rhymes on every page, we learned about chickadees, squirrels, bunnies, fawns, mice and the baby bear. We loved counting the animals on every page, showing how many animals we counted using our hands and seeing why all of the animals needed to wake up…they were welcoming a new fawn to their forest! After our books, most of us decided we wanted to color today. We spent a little bit of time playing on the rocks, but decided it was still a little too windy and came back inside the pavilion to chat and color. We realized that a lot of our markers were missing their caps and were too dry to color with, so we came up with a few solutions! We discovered that we could use a wet sponge to dip our dry markers into so they would work again and we dug through our coloring supplies, matching missing lids to their lonely markers. We’re so good at working together and solving problems!
Finally, we decided that we were ready to begin our Olympic adventures, so we bundled up, turned off our hand warms and headed outside. As we walked, we made different animal sounds. If you were nearby, you would have heard cats meowing, owls hooting and coyotes howling! We decided that some of our cold toes needed a warm up, so we headed inside the nature center and voted on six animals to learn more about. After serious discussion, we decided to learn more about Martens, Loons, Barred owls, Ruffed grouse, raccoons and bears! We learned that martens are in the weasel family and their hair gets a little bit lighter in the winter to help them with camouflage. They also grow more hair on their feet to help them walk on top of the snow easier! We learned that loons spend almost all of their time in the water and that they have red eyes to help them hunt fish under water. Our favorite fact was that their chicks ride on their backs until they are ready to float on their own! We learned that owls are nocturnal, they can’t move their eyes like humans, so they can turn their heads almost all the way around. We learned about the special snowshoes called pectinations that ruffed grouse grow on their toes for winter and they do a special dance and make drumming sounds in the Spring. To round off our learning, we talked about how raccoons and bears both have a great sense of smell and that they both love to get into trash cans! Raccoons have hands like ours, so they can open doors and jars and will even wash their food sometimes! Bears can smell and hear really well, though they don’t have the best eye sight.
After our learning and quick warm up, we transformed into Olympians and headed out for the opening ceremony! We had one friend who wanted to tell everyone when it was their turn, so we waited patiently until she told us to go. We cheered and laughed as our friends threw giant pinecones into a bucket, watched in awe as they jumped the river (sticks on the ground), giggled as they crawled through the tunnel of hula hoops and stood on our tiptoes to watch them sled down the hill. Some of us had so much fun that we asked some of our friends to race us, some of us wanted to go again on our own and some wanted to watch and cheer. We all decided that sledding would be the best way to end our games, we took turns testing out different positions to make our sleds go the farthest. We looked to our Sledding Official who gave us the all clear when it was time for us to go, making sure no one was at the bottom of the hill.
After a few runs down, we headed back to the pavilion for our closing ceremonies where we all got gold medal that represented the wonderful humans we are! The categories were Most Caring Friend, Ray of Sunshine, Fantastic Friend, Leadership Award, Super Supporter and Happy Helper. We are so lucky to be surrounded by such kind, silly, helpful and curious friends in class!
Thank you all for another amazing day in the lives of your Knee High Naturalists, they all seemed so excited and proud to receive their gold medals today and they were well deserved. We hope you have a wonderful week and we look forward to seeing you all next time when we become Ornithologists!
