Nature School~ Easter Hike and Benefits of Outdoor Education

Forest School Nature Hike 

 As Jack grows up, it becomes more and more important to spend time exploring the outdoors. We spent Easter Sunday hiking at a local riparian forest. Goals included:

• free exploration
• immersion in nature
• multi-sensory exploration (listening to birds, touching plants and sticks, smelling the fresh air, observing our surrounding, etc.)
• natural movement and exercise
• nature therapy
• nature education

 We traveled without a curriculum,  plan, or  specific objective.

We simply explored.

 Jack loved the bridges.

We heard many woodpeckers chiseling away in the treetops.

 We identified poison ivy (thanks to a helpful park sign) and learned to avoid it.

We used a plant identification app on my phone to identify local flora.

Below is a video of our Easter hike:

                                  

If you've been thinking of spending more time in nature, here are some wonderful benefits (from Wikipedia- Forest School (learning style):

• increased confidence and independence
• increased self-esteem
• abstract learning of mathematics and communication
• reduced stress
• improved concentration

Other benefits include:

• learning to overcome adversity
• increased problem-solving skills
• enhances teamwork and group solidarity
• develops leadership skills
• new understanding of natural environments

Easing In to the Brave Writer Lifestyle~ Enjoying Nature

I recently semi-ditched our English curriculum. Why?

As a writing tutor, writer, and lover of all things English myself, I felt like the clunky textbook too closely resembled something from school. It was dry, uninspiring, and way too methodical. Writing should be messy, experiential, and alive! Shouldn't it?

Field Trip Friday: The Bone Room and The Great Stoneface Park in Berkeley

This Friday, Aidyn, his grandma, and I ventured to Berkeley's  Bone Room and their quaint (but Great!) Stoneface Park.

The Bone Room is a natural history store full of sticks and stones and feathery plumes. The place is packed with the unusual, everything from real human skulls and radiuses (radiusi?) to freeze-dried lizards and fossil dung.

Oh, yes.

We decided to make the trek because we just finished reading the first two chapters of Story of the World and learned about fossils and other little things that creatures leave behind. Earlier in the week, Aidyn made a mold of his hand after we watched an episode of Beakman's World on fossils.

 

We mixed a 2-to-1 solution of Plaster of Paris.

 

The hardest part for Aidyn was keeping still for 15 minutes. It was a challenge in patience.

Anyway, we went to the Bone Room to check out some real bones and fossils. There were counters full, shelves full, drawers bursting full, and little jars full and stuffed creatures mounted everywhere. Probably to scare the hell out of  amuse people like me, they had a gigantic Burmese python that looked like this one we saw at a library program a couple months ago:

We all had fun picking out little treasures to take home. Aidyn plucked a T-Rex flip book and a scorpion necklace (with a real, but thankfully dead, scorpion), his grandma purchased a spider necklace, and I grabbed some bone beads (for math next week, of course), obsidian arrowheads, a scorpion bottle opener for David, and a antique-y looking poster of the human skeleton.

We had lunch afterward in a cozy, colorful taqueria,

and, to get the wiggles out, we found a fitting park called The Great Stoneface Park. Nestled in the hills of a quaint neighborhood in Berkeley, a small corner of the natural face of the mountain is preserved. In the middle of these gorgeous homes, large (and I mean, large) boulders and oak trees remain.

 

Aidyn wasted no time scaling up the trees and rocks like the proud Capricorn goat that he is.

 

Here's a good shot of Aidyn and his grandma.

 

 

And here's Aidyn and I.

 

 

He was so in his element.

Here he got a little wistful and asked if we could move there so he could climb this tree forever.

And to think he could have been sitting at a desk all day.

 

 

 

Homeschool Hike--Caswell and the Stanislaus River

Early this afternoon, Aidyn and I took a quick trip to Caswell Memorial State Park to enjoy the sun with a nature hike. Armed with a new sketchpad and colored pencils, we explored the area. We stopped to listen to birds, watched squirrels skit around the tree branches, and inhaled the fresh foresty aroma.

After taking a new trail, we discovered a small beach where we plucked sticks from the ground and tossed them in the river. We talked about currents as we watched the sticks sail down the river. We sunk our fingers in the sand and dipped our hands in the icy water. Planting ourselves on the sand-hill, we doodled in our nature journal. I wrote down the cute observations Aidyn was making and he drew his representation of our view of the Stanislaus River. We also ran our hands down the bumpy trunks of trees and talked about bark, branches, and how trees start out as little seeds.

I'm definitely happy to welcome back warm, comfortable weather!

Homeschool Hike

Early this afternoon, once I returned home from work, Aidyn, Grandma, and I set out for a leisurely hike. We searched for a trail I had discovered on trails.com, but found that it did not, in fact, exist! Luckily, we had a backup plan, but on the way we happened on another sort of trail. On a whim, we decided to hike that one instead. It was a cute, roughly mile-long path in Ripon that actually crosses over the Stanislaus River. Aidyn sat in his wagon and observed all the flora while Grandma and I talked, handed Aidyn assorted rocks and sticks to check out and alerted him to nearby squirrels and lizards.

My favorite part of the hike had to be when we all played "Pooh sticks." If you're not familiar with classic Winnie the Pooh stories, "Pooh Sticks" is a game where players toss a stick on one side of the bridge, dash over to the other side, and watch it reappear. We did this a number of times with both leaves and sticks. Aidyn even experimented with dropping a stick on the opposite side to see if it'd go backwards; thus, he learned something today about water currents.

Walking along the path, Grandma shared some sweet stories about her childhood that explained her love for trees. She remarked that on Sundays when she was a child, her dad used to gather the kids and take them out in the middle of nowhere under a tree and allow them to play. He'd always bring along a watermelon and slice pieces up for them to enjoy after they were done frolicking. So in learning about trees this week, Aidyn and I both had the opportunity to hear a sweet, nostalgic story and learn something new about Grandma.

Wonderful, explorative, naturesque day!