As Winter's Chill Fills the Sky, the Forest Dreamers Wave Goodbye!

Just as the cold weather approached, Forest Dreamers came to a seasonal close. Although we enjoy the cold weather and seasonal changes, it will be nice to do a little hibernating! Before we left, we decided to spend the week making gifts for our human families as well as our forest families!

Both classes spent the first half of the week making some deliciously good smelling gifts! We added cloves to an orange and made a quick and easy potpourri ball, then we added cinnamon, applesauce glue and cloves to make a concoction that felt like playdough and looked like mud! We even added some ‘ground’ cloves. We professionally ground them with our boots! After shaping them, into the oven they went! After baking for a few hours, we had the entire downstairs of Irvine smelling like a giant cookie! Even staff members were inquiring about the mystery scent. We shaped them into ornaments and had the chance to paint them and take them home!

We also created explosions over the fire- don’t worry, they were contained, small explosions… popcorn! We watched the popcorn cook in the oil over the fire and then stood back when the explosions began shooting out of the pot! We covered and listened to the fireworks inside the pot. When it was done, we opened the pot and checked on our creation. It was a bit burned, so we decided to try popcorn another way- in an air popper! We plugged in the air popper and watched the kernels go crazy. When they started popping and spilling over into our big bowl, we couldn’t keep our hands off of it! Our Tuesday and Thursday class reminded Ms. Tara and Ms. Paula of starving raccoons. The huge bowl of fluffy, white popcorn was gone in seconds! It was pretty laughable!

We saved the burned popcorn for our second half of the week for our animal snack!

Later on in the week, we brought back the old popcorn and it was perfectly stale enough to string onto thread to make garland. We used cranberries and oranges, too. We made predictions as to what the animals would enjoy the most. We wished we could check on our treats to see if we were right, but we’ll just have to hope they enjoy all of it!

Our story this week was Animals in Winter by Henrietta Bancroft. It talked about how animals fare in the winter. Some hibernate, some adapt and some migrate. It also harped on things we can do to help out the animals that decide to stick around-one of them was creating fruit and nut garland! Check!

Have a wonder-filled winter. We will see you in the spring!

Tuesday/Thursday