Scouting a New Educational Site: 9-13-15

Bringing the Red Foxes together for their first outing of the fall was such a treat! The gals came together as if no time had passed and jumped right into the task at hand - scouting this site for a future Montessori school and future outdoor adventures.

We started our day with the Dragonflies to create a plan for how we would see as much of the 60 acres of property as possible. We talked about the information we wanted to collect, how we could keep track of all this information, and how the explorers could use their perspective to help shift what actually happens on this site.

The Dragonflies headed one way and the Red Foxes made their way towards the garden and greenhouse structure. Right off the bat we had an amazing discovery. We found hatched robin eggs in a nest! One of the eggs had something in, so using careful hands we broke apart the egg to find a hardened old egg yolk with the early stages of a robin hardened within this amber-colored egg. We were all completely blown away by this discovery and were left with more questions that answers; how did this harden like this? what stage was the bird in when it died? how come 2 of the 3 survived?

From there, we spent time brainstorming what could be done in this particular garden area.  The girls had so many amazing ideas; we talked about how future students could be involved in every step of the gardening process from preparing the soil to choosing food to eventually serve in the cafeteria to learning about permaculture and closed loop gardening.

Sadie and Sammie examining the out of use raised beds.

From the garden, we walked the fence of the school. Noticing critical native plants like snow berry and native blackberry. The school proved to be filled with cool teaching opportunities. The girls thought about creating mini-outdoor classrooms where you could focus on different topics. We also thought about creating a really robust recycling program at the school and moving the school towards being completely zero waste. This was prompted by the fact that there was lots of trash laying around the grounds of the building.

After breaking at the school for a snack and some discussion, we moved down a trail behind the building. This trail definitely needed some love, and the girls thought it would be great to have future students learn about trail building and help to maintain all the trails on this property. The trail eventually lead us to an open alder and cottonwood field. We spent time exploring here and discovered black tail dear scat, bear scat, and either cougar or coyote scat! It was cool to be in an area where so many other creatures had been. We spent time looking at, breaking up scat, and trying to identify scat. In this same area we discovered three more birds' nests and an abandoned paper wasp nest.

Maddie looking closely at the paper wasp nest

We then decided rather than turning around, we would take the chance and continue to follow this trail. We all felt that it was heading in the right direction and we all had a bit of explorer's fever!

The trail took us out to huge field where we jumped on marshmallows (hay bales) and harvested some down cottonwood buds for our future medicinal plants outing! We weren't planning on harvesting cottonwood buds, but because of the storm from a few weeks ago, there are countless down cottonwood branches and this allowed the girls to see the first step in making salve.

After our play time and harvest, we made our way down to Anderson Creek. When we arrived to this area, we encountered the Dragonflies. They had just opened a wood duck box and discovered 23 wood duck egg membranes! We got to touch the down feathers the mom and baby wood ducks had left behind before flying out of the wood duck box, and we distributed the feathers around the area to leave a clean wood duck box for future inhabitants. This prompted our gals to think about ways to integrate these boxes and other habitat-creating service projects into our ideas for future programming at this site.

We then moved to Anderson Creek. The girls put together a boat race and created boats to float down the creek. Within a few minutes, we held a quick boat race. Our race was quick, and before long, we were back on the trail heading to our ending place. We summarized our recommendations to the Montessori school (check them out below) and presented our ideas to the Dragonflies. To see pictures from our day, click here. Next up, the Red Foxes will be taking on medicinal plants!!

Our recommendations:
- Teaching farm and garden with students involved at every step: planning, building, growing, animal handling,  marketing and selling food.
- Medicinal herbs and foraging classes
- Trail building and maintenance
- Working towards becoming a zero waste site