On Friday during math, children were presented with the following problem:  A king is building a castle using 10 blocks.  The castle can have any number of towers, but no two towers can be the same height.  What could this castle look like?  There are 10 possible solutions and I challenged them to try to find all 10.  Everyone worked hard and most children found at least 5 solutions, but nobody was able to find 10 so we came back to the circle and I told them we would have to put our heads together, which was taken quite literally!  After sharing our collective thoughts, as a class we were able to find all 10 solutions.  We talked about how challenging this problem was and what was needed for us to find all of the solutions.  We decided on two important skills that were critical for our success- teamwork and perseverance.

Putting our heads together!

On Thursday morning we were treated to a fabulous jump rope assembly.  Children in all grade levels demonstrated the jump roping skills they have been working on in gym with Miss Ally and showed lots of hard work and determination!

On Wednesday during ECO we played two games that focused on senses other than sight.  In the first game we relied on our sense of hearing.  We worked in pairs and pretended to be a mama bird and her baby.  First we decided on a unique call or song.  One partner was the baby bird and closed his or her eyes while the other partner, mama bird, slowly moved around repeating our call.  The baby birds had to try to follow the mama by picking out their unique call from all of the others.

In the second game called "Meet a Tree" children again worked in pairs or groups of three.  One child was blindfolded while his or her partner led him to a tree.  The blindfolded partner took a moment to get to know the tree by feeling it and perhaps smelling it, thinking about its size, shape, and texture. Then the blindfolded partner was led away. With the blindfold removed the challenge was to try to find the same tree.  This was a really fun game that included some great partner skills like trust and empathy.

We took advantage of the ongoing winter and snow-covered ground by exploring tracking during the last few weeks.  We read several tracking stories that gave children practice in looking at tracks and inferring the story told by the tracks.  Two of these books were Whose Tracks Are These?  A Clue Book of Familiar Forest Animals, by James Nail and Hyla Skudder and Who's Been Here?:  A Tale in Tracks, by Fran Hodgkins.  Both of these books encourage children to use tracks in context as well as other clues to interpret what happened.  Last week during ECO when we first arrived in the field we discovered numerous tracks.  Children were eager to explore so we spent the first part of our session following trails and thinking about the story that each one told.  We also saw many tracks as we headed into the woods.

This week during our ECO session at school we split into groups and used craft sticks to set our own trails leading to a stuffed animal at the end.  Before we set our trails we discussed the trickiness of real animal tracks:  animals don't necessarily follow a direct route and the tracks aren't always obvious. In the end I think the consensus was that our own trails were a bit easier to follow.  We also completed our own tracking backgrounds and shared shadow puppet shows that told a short story for each of our nature names.  And now we are looking forward to spring like weather next week!