You read it correctly- soggy worms are the worst (I prefer al dente, myself)! The Forest Dreamers learned this mnemonic device to remember the Cardinal directions- north, south, east and west! With use of a handy compass tool and a map of Irvine’s trails, we took off north toward the wetland area to discover cattails! We had a great time pulling them apart and blowing their seeds much like we enjoyed the (now used up) milkweed in the meadow during the late days of summer. Mr. Andrew helped the class figure out which direction the breeze was blowing based on where the seeds traveled. We then used the cattails as kindling for a fun and spontaneous fire by the barn!
We spent the week looking at Irvine’s trail maps. We noted areas of interest like the famous ‘Autumn Olive’ trail and added the maps into our journals. We talked about which direction we would have to head to get to each notable site!
On Thursday, Ms. Paula taught us about Aborigine ‘song lines’. These were songs that the native Aborigines of Australia would sing while traveling long distances across the Outback to help them find their way home. They used notable landmarks, numbers of footsteps, direction of the sun and wind, and many other descriptions of their landscape to remember their way. We made our own song line that would get us between our daily meeting point and the meadow. To our delight and surprise, the group very specifically recalled each notable landmark on the trail to the meadow and in correct chronological order (we checked our work to make sure!).
We then headed southwest toward the bottom of the central meadow to discover a really neat place where the stream was running. We had a great time collecting river clay and playing Aborigines!
Our story this week was called Armadillo from Amarillo by Lynne Cherry . It was a very sweet story that read like a poem and talked about distance perception. Curious Armadillo wondered where in the world he was, and with the help of a golden eagle, he learned that he was from a prairie, near a city called Amarillo, in a state called Texas, that bordered a state called New Mexico, that was on a continent called North America, that was on a planet called Earth!
The Sky’s the Limit, Forest Flyers!
