Not All Classrooms Have 4 Walls

02/28/2024

Another fun day learning with our niños. We spent some riverside time turning over logs to find isopods like rollie pollies and also noticed spring 🕷️🕷️ are starting to emerge!

During circle time we introduced a Leave No Trace interactive game origins by Ms. Amy. The illustration shows a beautiful mountain valley with a crystal clear lake (bowl of water) in the center. I told the story of how my friend Kaity first found this pristine place and how each subsequent visitor to discover the area left their impact. It begins with just a couple of tents being pitched, a family home being built, followed by many more homes, cars, a hamburger stand, gas station, animal and vegetable farms and even a factory!

Each person and animal has an environmental impact and our friends got to go around the circle adding items like gravel, bits of trash, sunscreen, soap, oil, ice melt salt, fertilizer (represented by red sprinkles) and even smog from the factory, which all ultimately wind up in the formerly crystal clear lake through our watershed. At the end of the story, nobody felt like swimming in this lake anymore.

We asked our friends, what we could do to clean the area, or make rules for travelers and dwellers to have less of a negative impact on the land. For such young minds it was remarkable how well they grasp this cumulative concept and even more inspiring, how they are aware that the more we work TOGETHER, the more good we can do!

🌳🦗🐛🐝Ms. Amanda🐌🕷️

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