We began our Fall 2024 term the week of the Autumn Equinox, surrounded by wild grapes, Manzanita berries, ripening acorns, and the sweet chatter of migrating songbirds. We welcomed autumn with an Equinox Celebration, offering ripe fruits and other seasonal abundance to help the animals and birds who were preparing for the long, cold winter ahead.
For weeks we kept busy enjoying the fruits of the season, making corn husk dolls and necklaces, Manzanita sugar, and stringing Madrone berries. We also couldn't resist making some felted wool acorns, which teaches the important skill of wet felting and results in an adorable, very realistic wool acorn!
Free play and nature exploration is a core part of our rhythm and there is always lots of time to investigate logs, sticks, puddles, frogs, plants, and harvest wild grapes or rose hips on our autumn wanders.
Wednesdays are an all-school skills day, when we focus on earth skills development, handwork projects, and nature awareness. When the weather got chilly and we were ready to welcome fire into our curriculum, we studied the bow drill method of fire by friction, how to find dry material for tinder, make a tinder bundle, and build a fire structure using small sticks. We will continue to focus on fire making this winter.
We celebrated Halloween by transforming into wild animals with costumes or face paint or just our willpower, and played games to understand how these animals would interact with their environment and each other.
October brought ripe acorns down from the oak trees, and we all gathered as many as we could on our morning adventures. Then came many days of focused acorn cracking, sorting, and drying. We learned about how to know if an acorn is good, if it has weevils, and how to spot rot in the fresh nutmeat. After leeching (soaking ground acorns in water), the acorn flour was finally ready to make acorn pancakes, which is a favorite Earthwise activity and tradition. Yum!
December brought some beautiful sunny days and we enjoyed seasonal crafting outside in our "schoolyard," making wreaths, beeswax candles, and finishing our lanterns (since the Lantern Walk was cancelled in November due to rain). The Saplings completed their pine needle basket projects, which they worked on throughout most of the fall term.
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