Our class has a magic “reset” button. If we are tired or grumpy or just having a blah sort of a day, we head outside. No matter the month or the weather, we always find something that sparks our curiosity and brings excitement and smiles to our faces.

We walk all over the school grounds and the neighbouring park a few times each week. As we have become familiar with this place, we have found favourite spots to revisit again and again. As reports are going home tomorrow and many students listed the outdoors as the best part of Kindergarten, we thought we should introduce you to some of these spots.

The Magic Forest

The Magic Forest – the group of big trees by the tennis courts – was one of the first places we visited as a class. By October, it was covered in leaves and then the Fall winds came and the ground was piled with pinecones. It has sparked conversations about really big numbers and if it is possible to count all of the leaves or pinecones in a forest. We swished our boots through the leaf piles and created numbers and cities with the pinecones. When we looked carefully at the trunks of the trees, we found mushrooms sprouting everywhere – inspiring many magical stories about who or what might live in our forest. When it rains, we stop and take big deep breaths under the dripping evergreen branches – which they always claim smells like coffee! Now, we are excitedly watching for signs of Spring and predicting when the “naked trees” will sprout leaves again.

Puddle World

Just beyond our school playground is a mostly flooded and muddy field, that we call “Puddle World” (thank you for the name, Aviana!) We have been very curious about where the water pools and the pathways the water takes as it flows down to the storm drains. For a little while, Puddle World froze over as the temperatures dipped down and it became Ice World. Then, as the ice melted, the field has become Mud World. We have even found a “mud rainbow” in this field.

The Spinner Playground

If we continue past Puddle World and walk through the Magic Forest, we will arrive at the Spinner Playground. Recently, this has been a favourite place to explore force and motion – there are so many opportunities to learn about pushes and pulls at the playground.

Teamwork and squeals of glee: Spinner

The River

The most requested place to visit this term has been “The River.” The ditch between the parking lot and the tennis courts has been a place of discovery and risk taking: for both the students and myself. When we first walked past the water, some students immediately wanted to get right in the water and explore. Some were happy to watch from the sidelines and the dry safety of the little bridge – myself included! Over the course of a few weeks, we returned to “the river” (as our class has named it) again and again. Students who very cautiously inched down to the water on our first visit, now hop back and forth without hesitation. We are all happy to get right in and play with the water flow and move around the rocks. We have noticed that at the end of our river, the water flows into a storm drain that we know will eventually lead to the ocean and to the fish. We always make sure to remove any garbage we find, because we don’t want all of that plastic getting into our oceans.

It is hard to explain how important this little trickle of water has become to our class or how magical it can be when we are all engaged with different activities connected to this place. Here are a few of the reasons they thought that you should know about:

“We like to collect the rocks.”

“The water is awesome.”

“There is a nice bridge, so I can stay dry. We make Marvel movies with Alexine and Ms. R when we are there.”

“We can go fishing.”

“We play the cheetah game!”

“The best part of visiting the river is listening to the sound. The water makes a quiet sound.”

“The river is way better than a boring old playground. It’s like the most awesome playground ever!”

And sometimes, if we are lucky, we find something wiggling in the water: The Worm

We are very protective of the worms.

We are already making plans for our Outdoor Explorations after Spring Break. We definitely want to visit Beecher Creek more often. We are also thinking about a Butterfly Garden so the painted lady butterflies we will be raising will have a happy home. Stay tuned!