What a beautiful day for our Turtles to explore the trails and forests in search of leaves to investigate! UnbeLEAFable!! Thanks to Coyote who came to visit us in the morning and to Raccoon who stayed all day to help us and to take photos of our little naturalists in action! We gave Coyote our best attention with our morning activities. Do you remember buzzing like a bee and slurping nectar? What nature call is the signal to freeze?
The leaves on trees turn different colours in the fall but it turns out those colours were in the leaf all along. The experiment we did showed us that some non-permanent markers like black and brown show other colours when we add water. What kind of colours were revealed on your napkin? Can you remember the steps to do this experiment at home? Maybe you want to try this experiment with another colour at home?
On our trail walk in the morning we stopped to watch the geese we had heard earlier at the Hall. They were honking to each other and chilling in the pond. Do you like just chilling with your friends and family? I guess we are more like geese than we thought. As we continued on our travels, Dragonfly stopped, put down a sheet and invited us to search for interesting leaves to stick into cardboard or to just collect and observe. Catfish had a collection of maple leaves which looked like a crown. It was helpful to have a leaf poster and identification card with us so we could try to match the leaves we found with the labelled ones. Some of the Turtles took their nature notebooks and made leaf rubbings using different fall coloured crayons. Did your rubbing look like the leaf you used? What else would you like to use for rubbing activities in the future?
Today in the library, Grey Squirrel sent us on a nature scavenger hunt, finding matches to the items on our game card! Who doesn’t love a fun scavenger hunt! After we finished our hunt we listened to three books, all very different! The Turtles loved the mystery nature book where we had to guess the animal based on a description of habits and behaviours. Cardinal’s favourite book was about poems and that poems can be as simple as just talking about your emotions. Doesn’t that sound easy? Did you think creating a poem would be difficult? Maybe it is not as difficult as you may think. You just need to be creative and to explore how you feel about the world around you. Daniel made a poem based on the nature he saw at the park. Maybe you and your family can take a nature walk and talk about how your surroundings make you feel? A great start to becoming a nature poet! Thanks to Grey Squirrel for the pencils! Maybe you can use them to start a nature journal at home?
Wow, what nature artists we have! In the afternoon, we gathered our favourite leaves, seeds, flowers and any other beautiful treasures we could find on our walk to Cedar Hideaway! When we arrived, we got into pairs and into two groups and started arranging our pieces into picture frames. So great to see the teamwork, making sure our partner had a chance to use their items too. Afterwards we shared about what we gathered at the ‘art museums’ for a tour, looking at how the Turtle friends arranged things and why. Then the guessing challenge began! Did you guess who created the art? Which leaf art did you like the best? Lovely to see all the sharing and celebrating of all the different perspectives and creative expressions.
Happy trails until next week! Dragonfly and Cardinal
Comments