November 17
Fire days are the best! With hot chocolate, donuts, chestnuts, s’mores, and stone soup on the menu, along with making spruce salve, perfect weather, fire building and lots of play, we filled the day and it went too fast!
We are going to surely miss all your sweet faces, big laughs and listening in on all your planning, impressive ideas and all the playing!
Here’s what you can do with your salve in case you didn’t get a sheet 🙂
Spruce Tip and Juniper Berry Salve
Here’s some uses of spruce tip salve:
– Cuts, scrapes, rash, minor burns. Cold sores, acne, bug bites and stings, dry skin.
– It has some pain relief action so apply to bruises, strained muscles or sore joints.
– It makes a great chest rub for congestion especially if eucalyptus essential oil (2-3 drops) is applied to chest and the spruce tip salve is applied over that.
Enjoy!
Previous Weeks
We spent our precious time building memories with… tree climbing, rope swinging, whittling, relaxing in hammocks and exploring our coulees! We finished the day learning about what to pack for a hiking trip and the 5c’s of survival.
With the fire ban finally lifted, we set our sights to starting fires! We learned to make a birds nest and went foraging for nature that easily ignites and made our own nests. Using ferro rods to start fires I think every wildling was able to start a fire of their own today…. If not multiple!
We spent the day making many fires, roasting fire foods, making up/presenting plays, and non stop playing!
We ended the day with 2 play presentations created by your wildlings!
With snow all around we worked hard as a group making a survival winter shelter, a Quinzee. We didn’t get a huge one built however we did get a big enough one that these wildlings know what to do! It then got turned into a fun tunnel of course!
Some stayed at home base making up games, swinging in the hammocks and some went to the pond where we worked to crack up the ice starting to form. We tobogganed down a mud hill and practiced what to do if ice ever cracked while out on water.
We ended the day drinking hot chocolate, playing MANY rounds of a frog game and listened to a friendly witch story.
We left the day open to explore, savouring the warmth before the snow! We ended up on a big adventure crossing the bridge to check out the tunnel, beaver logs, dam and climb to the top of the coulees!
The excitement of our coulee caves drew us in again today! On our walk there we gathered sticks and charcoal in preparation of making natural adhesive. We settled in under the secret garden tree to make the natural adhesive and use it to make some spears!
These wildlings then excitingly ran back to the caves for non stop play of imagination, climbing and exploring!
With the hot sun and clear skies as our constant we scratched our original plans and headed to the water!
There we experimented with mud and the current. Some of us went over to our “loch nest” site to build forts and explore. We love this site as it teaches kids to quickly risk assess and trust their bodies as they walk and jump from place to place balancing on a constantly changing ground. It was a day where everyone truly did what called to them most, whether it was whittling, water fights, lounging in the shade, collecting chokecherries and using them to paint rocks…. So many things were happening all simultaneously and it was beautiful!
With a unanimous vote we tracked to route 96, our coulee caves and crevices. Using every muscle in our body, we hiked, climbed, and crawled in pursuit of exploring.
After going over knife/saw techniques and safety we dove into the exciting world of whittling. Some wildlings headed back to the caverns to “mine” and others whittled away while practising their storytelling techniques to each other. I must say we have some amazing storytellers in our group!
We ended the day reading different indigenous stories while scattered around the forest and in the world‘s best climbing tree. Sampling our local prickly pear cactus and falling in love with the chickadees and woodpeckers.
With the rain, lightly sprinkling on us throughout the day, we set off in search of the witches hut. Giving the kids the reigns we made a couple switchbacks, but found our way! We explored, questioned the world of engineering, and allowed the unique backdrop to help create our world of imaginative play! We finished the day playing man tracker, observing a freshly fallen tree by the hands/teeth of a beaver. Coming back to enjoy our warm apple cider that had been soaking up all the apple flavour throughout the time we were gone.
These wildings are so much fun!
As we travelled through the woods we let our feet and curiosity guide us! With intention to travel to many places they quickly found a place they never wanted to leave! Nestled beside a beaver lodge, under the train bridge, with mud for days! There was too many experiments going on at the same time to count! There was slide building, dam building, painting, “mortaring” of a fallen log to be smooth, frog catching, crawfish watching…
We ended the day playing many rounds of tarp camouflage!
Can’t wait for all of our future adventures!
*We didnt get many pics of the first day, however we have a instagram video up of a dam project many were working on for a LONG while! Check it out here!
Side note: 😊 If you haven’t yet, could you put a hand towel in your child’s backpack along with 2-3 empty bread bags. We end up using these things quite a bit. Water just calls to every Child’s heart!
