We wanted to do so much and so little this week! So much, in that we wanted to nurture a forest-like feeling for our shared learning environment. So little, in that we wanted to leave plenty of room for our activity to flow from the intersection of our wants, needs, and interests with what was happening around us, like a saunter through the forest rather than being conveyed down an assembly line.

The biggest thing we did to nurture a forest-like feeling was to suggest that we get out into the forest as soon and as often as we could. Some of our walks were exploratory. Some took us to a spot on the creek where we’ve been building dams and bridges and are working on getting a fire started in a fire pit using a Ferro rod and natural materials. Our walks always included lots of looking for and identifying animals, plants, and fungi and also lots of relationship building.

We started our first day with a walk to take a look at the land where our learning adventure will be based. When we got back to our building, we asked the kids to list things they wanted to do and/or learn about. We had a list of about 20 activities as a backup. We asked them to take turns listing an idea on the whiteboard. Their list was amazing and had many items I had also thought of on it, including animal tracking, exploring fire, gardening, cooking with natural resources, and planting watermelons randomly around the property. We talked some about each as we listed them. Then we went on a creek walk that included lots of talking about plants and animals we saw along the way. We also did some tracking and being identification and the way to and from the creek and dam building at the creek. On the way back to school I talked with each of the kids a little about their relationships with math and what kind of stuff they were working on. When we got back to the building we worked a little on a map of the farm and played Monopoly and Scrabble. At some point during the day, several of us also talked about meta-patterns (we just called them patterns at the time) found in nature including grains, spirals, layers, branches, and webs. We need to get cycles in there soon! We also had some conversations about working with nature. I also used one of my new favorite phrases learned from one of my adult biological children, “teamwork makes the dream work” whenever I could fit it in.

We also nurtured this forest feeling by not packing our days with activities. We have an eight-hour school day (8:00am-4:00pm) with 15 minutes at both the beginning and end of the day, for a relaxed entry and exit. In addition to having ample time in our day, we had, as mentioned above, a list of about 20 possible activities going into the week. Those activities were distributed between nature connection (e.g., animal charades, the interaction game, hiking, starting a fire with a Ferro rod, working with blades, building dams and bridges in the creek), nature-based science (e.g., the science of fire, water cycle, taxonomy, watching The Story of Stuff and The New Story of the Earth), getting to know each other through discussion and writing topics, social justice based social sciences (e.g., how do we want to make decisions together, the anarchy and archy continuum), and other activities (e.g., build a system game, Taiji). We didn’t expect to get to all of our listed activities. We did many of them. We’ll do others later. We may never get to some of them. And, we did lots of other things (e.g., discussed the power elite and the cultural context of social change and talked about fashion over the ages). Also, our plans were pretty general to leave plenty of room for our community to evolve through our interactions with each other and the rest of our learning environment.

Our walks in the woods throughout the week and our chance encounters with beings and other aspects of our local ecosystem also set the stage for how we encountered the ideas we discussed: no rigid boundaries around subject areas, just wondering through a forest of ideas! We also left lots of space for us to get to know the kids better and for them to get to know each other better. And, we had lots of direct communication about the nature of our interactions (consensus and consent-based) and our shared decision-making processes (what classes, do y’all want a math class).

It was wonderful seeing the kids become increasingly empowered via nature connection and their ecophilia (love of nature) seemed to expand from a high starting point as they learned new skills and ways to interact with nature.

We had our first math class on Thursday. I had told the kids I was happy doing math with them at any time. I didn’t get any requests. I asked “B” if she wanted to schedule math time. She said it probably wouldn’t happen if we didn’t schedule it and she wants it to happen. We talked with the other kids and they all agreed they wanted a scheduled math time, so we do. We also had a great time playing around with chemistry. My favorite starting place for this is to just let the kids play with a ball-and-stick molecular modeling kit and then introduce constraints on their play (i.e., every atom must use all of its available bonds, what I say is every nub has to have a connector and every connector has to connect to two nubs) and only then to start introducing what the models stand for. In this session, we got up to modeling the combustion of hydrogen with oxygen.

Our emerging schedule looks something like this at the moment:

o Check-in (How are you feeling, something you’re grateful for, requests of the group, requests of the universe.

o Outside time – nature walks, creek damming, bridge building and fire starting, soon to add on weaving and building

o Inside time

o Lunch

o Math

o DEAR

o Journal (maybe writing to prompt or journal in the future)

OK. I gotta get some rest. Our second week of school starts tomorrow!