Fall 2021 Wrap up and Celebration

Fall 2021 Wrap up and Celebration

I can’t believe that the Fall session has come to an end! This past week we celebrated every day with special food: nettle and rosehip tea, hemlock tea, fire roasted pumpkin seeds, and popcorn over the fire. What kind of celebration would it be without costumes! It was like a party every day.   

We also retold our Peace Superhero Story. This story was adapted from the Haudenosaunee peace story by Melissa Blake in collaboration with tribe members. In this story we meet Fine Words Fox, who uses their finest words, like please and how are you feeling. We also meet Shadow Tail, the squirrel, who grows in size when they realize how good it feels to help out. Shadow Tail carries the other Peace Superheroes on their back as they journey through the forest. Next, we meet Feel Better Butterfly, who helps others to feel better with their beautiful dancing and kind words. Peaceful Porcupine helps others to find inner peace by guiding them to take deep breaths, saying, “Everybody fill your balloon. And let it all out.” Our final superhero is Unity Unicorn who helps others to find common ground and things they can all agree on. The Peace Superheroes left us five peace stones to help us remember their superpowers and how to use them. 

On the last two days, we performed a song we had been working on all week. The first verse is one that we sing at school. The following verses the children made up themselves:

 

My roots go down, down into the earth
My roots go down, down into the earth
My roots go down, down into the earth
My roots go down
 
I am a Jaguar eating ice cream
I am a Jaguar eating ice cream
I am a Jaguar eating ice cream
My roots go down
 
I am a unicorn eating a marshmallow
I am a unicorn eating a marshmallow
I am a unicorn eating a marshmallow
My roots go down
 
I am a stick jumping on a trampoline
I am a stick jumping on a trampoline
I am a stick jumping on a trampoline

My roots go down

Enjoy this fun little video from one of the performances. laughing

Mud and Snow

Mud and Snow

We have had so much fun playing in both the snow and mud this past week. 

We have also been working on making friction fires with a bow drill. The kids have been helping us gather supplies for tinder bundles, whispies, pencil, and marker sticks. They encourage us, when we are having a hard time getting a coal and are amazed when the fire starts. It has been a fun process to get them involved with and learn about. 

More photos from the week. 

Duwisduwi

Duwisduwi

What a wild ride this weather has been.  Warm, cold, snow, rain, wind, and sun! The kids have been making some strong friendships. It is so much fun to watch them bloom. There have been so many games of family and different animals.

This past week we learned about birds. On Monday and Tuesday we went on a wander to fill up a bird feeder near another camp that the homeschool kids use and to see if any seeds had been eaten yet. We learned some bird songs and practiced the chickadee, cardinal, and blue jays calls. We also learned the Gayogohó:nǫˀ word for sandpiper which is Duwisduwi. We had a lot of fun saying that name as it also mimics the sound the bird makes. Duwisduwi is also one of the six clan names of the Gayogohó:nǫˀ people. When the children learned that the song birds who don’t fly south have to forage for food all winter, they were excited to make bird feeders and provide some food for them. On Wednesday and Thursday we made bird feeders with pine cones, peanut butter and birdseed. Many of the children took home bird feeders and we also hung up several around Trillium Camp. We hope we will get to see some birds snacking while we are there some days.

Last week we focused on trees and learned how to tell the difference between Maple and Sycamore leaves. We also made White Pine tea. The children love harvesting White Pine needles.  I’m looking forward to more adventures in the forest this fall and making observations at our bird feeders in the weeks ahead. 

Pumpkins and Dress up time!

Pumpkins and Dress up time!

We had so much fun this week with pumpkins! When we arrived to Trillium Camp on Monday we found a large pumpkin waiting for us. The children were very excited to find this surprise. We cut open our pumpkin and removed the seeds. The kids worked very hard to get them all out. On Tuesday and Wednesday we hammered pieces of the meat of the pumpkin to boards to make feeders for the animals. We placed them around camp so we can make observations of what might like to eat it. So far we saw ants and slugs enjoying them. We hope to see some teeth marks of larger animals too eventually. We also spotted a large toad while placing our feeders! On Thursday we roasted our seeds and alomst everyone loved them.

We also got out the costume box on Monday and Thursday and the children had a lot of fun becoming different animals and people. Many became owls. We also had a pizza maker, a parent, a fairy or two, and a few horses.

Another amazing thing that happed this week was that Trillium camp flooded on Tueday night. The children loved playing in the puddles and mud all week. On Thursday we gathered sand and brought it down to fill a big hole left by the raging water.

Autumn Harvest

Autumn Harvest

So far this fall we have been focusing on getting to know each other, establishing ground rules and noticing all the abundance that this time of year has to offer! One of our first harvesting activities was to make sun tea with sumac, goldenrod, and white pine needles. It was delicious and the kids loved learning about the plants and the process of making the tea. The next week we roasted apples over the fire. Every time we build a fire the kids love it. They help gather fire wood and wispies to start the fires. They sing the fire sing with us to get it going:

 

Burn fire, burn
Stoke your inner fire
Let the smoke inside you rise
Blow that flame to life
We tell lots of stories at “slunch time”. Some days they ask for more and more stories.  One day last week all the kids listened intently for 45 minutes to several stories! 
One of the stories we have told is the peace superhero story. This story was inspired by the  Hodinöhsö:ni’ peace make story and features  Fine Words Fox, Feel Better Butterfly, Peaceful Porcupine, Unity Unicorn, and Shadow tail (the helper squirrel). We have peace stones that the peace superheros left at camp for us to use to help us resolve conflict. The kids love the peace superheroes. 

Of course we have played a lot of running games, and a lot of fun imagination games in the sandbox and creek. We have found many toads, had visits from chipmunks, and caught crayfish in the creek.

 This past week we met the shagbark hickory tree and learned to identify it and it’s nuts.  We also smashed hickory nuts in our large smasher then boiled them in a gallon of water over the fire.  After straining out the nut meat and shells, we enjoyed our hickory nut milk. On a wonder to meet Grandmother Hickory the kids asked why this tree had a name.  We talked about how much bigger this tree is than all the other hickory trees around and how the seeds that grew the smaller trees had likely come from the Grandmother tree. We then measured around her trunk and found it took one instructor and three children holding hands to reach around her trunk. This spurred all the children to start measuring around the other hickory trees and deciding who was mom, brother, baby, etc.

We have also been singing the I thank the earth song a lot:

I thank the earth for feeding my body
I thank the sun for warming my bones
I thank the trees for the air that I breathe, and
I thank the water for nourishing my soul

Office Location:
Cornell Cooperative Extension, 615 Willow Ave., Ithaca, NY 14850
607-272-2292 | email Us

Preschool Location:
4-H Acres, 418 Lower Creek Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850


Ithaca Forest Preschool is a nature immersion program for children ages 3-5. Our program is run in cooperation with Primitive Pursuits, a project of Cornell Cooperative Extension.