What  a beautiful day for a hike!

Today we joined Mrs. Lozano and Mrs. Park, hiking past the main school in into Elk Meadow.  As we past through different environments, we took time to “notice” changes in plants/trees that we had discussed prior to our adventure.  We used our senses to explore nature, using our eyes to notice the seeds that were coming from some plants and our hands to touch and hold them.  We smelled mossy bark and touched some soft, lambs ears.

The children helped to collect natural materials that had “fallen” from nature.  They did a great job following the instructions, only picking up fallen leaves, pine needs/cones, bark, dead/fallen wild flowers, feathers and even some mica (although that didn’t truly fall from nature, we all agreed it was so plentiful that picking up just a tad couldn’t hurt).

Once we returned to school, we poured all of the objects out of the bag and each child took a turn to select an object, and using their sense of touch, identify how they object felt. The children then passed the object along to their friends and each child took a turn describing how that object felt to them.  From there, the child who selected the object made the final decision about what adjective we would use to describe the piece of nature, and we then labeled a hand/poster and glued it on.  At the end, we also listened to the sounds some of the objects made (crunchy leaves rustled, dried grass smelled musty (or like cookies to some of the children) and we even saw green moss growing on a piece of bark.  Of course, we our sense of sight and touch to catch the little spiders that hitched a ride in our nature bag.

After a wonderful exploration of fall, nature and our senses, the children lay down for a long, well earned rest.