Forest School
Kindergarten and First Grade
in New York City

We had another wet start to our week. The children worked together to set up our rain tarp to create a dry “fort” area to keep our gear and eat our lunch. It was a great exercise in teamwork, and we have begun to work on tying knots. We stayed much drier than last week so thank you to all for providing your children with proper rain gear!

 The children made a mud restaurant, an expansion on their previous mud kitchen.

The chef’s special was a mud pizza for birds with a choice of worms, grubs, or moths for toppings.

 We played a game of “match the muddy boot-print to the boot” and discussed how we were using our boot-prints to identify which child had stepped in the mud, just like we can use animal tracks to identify which animals have been here.

 For social-emotional learning we read “Waiting is Not Easy” by Mo Willems and discussed strategies for what to do when it feels difficult to wait. We also read “Ruby Finds a Worry” by Tom Percival. We talked about what it means to be worried and some things we might feel worried about and what we can do when we have a worry. Throughout our day we can reference these books when these feelings come up in our class, so we will read them again throughout the year as needed.

 We wrote acrostic poetry, where the first letter of each line forms a word. See attached.

 We continued to work on the letters M, T, and F, reviewing what sounds they make and recognizing new sight-words that begin with these letters. We began to make our alphabet books. These will come home once all 26 letters are complete.

 We went on a counting hunt to find 20 objects in nature. We used the objects to practice skip counting by 5s. We played a “find the missing number” game and practiced writing numbers by filling in the missing number between 1 and 20. We reread Math Fables by Greg Tang and used sticks to show all the different ways to make the numbers 1-10.

 Wishing everyone safety during these flash floods…