Leaves, leaves, and more leaves!

Fall is the time for leaves, and our kiddos have been busy collecting them, presenting them as gifts to parents and friends, painting with them, even wearing them as hats!

 

In Nature class, we learned why leaves change color and fall off of the trees by doing an experiment to take the color out of the leaves.  Check out the photos below to see how 

it was done!

See you outside!

Prairie Exploration

This week we learned about the prairie!

We are lucky enough to have a little pocket of prairie of our own here at Country Day.  Each class had the chance to visit the prairie and discover the flowers and grasses and animals that live there.

We learned that prairie plants have especially long roots to survive a dry environment.  Some of them, like the Big Blue Stem Grass has roots up to 10 feet long!

10 feet or 3 kids long!

We also collected prairie seeds to giveaway at our Earth Day Clean-up this year!

See you outside!

Mushroom hunting!

Welcome to a new year of Nature!  For our first week, we learned how to use a scientific tool called a magnifying glass!

We went mushroom hunting and found quite a few different types of mushrooms around the school.  Check them out!

See you outside!

Thanks for the pumpkins!

Thank you to everyone who donated their pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns to the school.  The kids had fun weighing and measuring them in the Lower Maka, hauling them with trucks and wheelbarrows in the Upper Maka, rolling them down hills in the llama pasture and eventually helping them to make their way into our gardens as extra compost for next year's plants.  Check out the photos below.

Thank you!

Wolves

Thanks to a learning kit from the Minnesota DNR, we learned about wolves during the week of Halloween.  Many people think of wolves as being scary creatures.  We found out that wolves are a lot more like us than we realized.  Here are some similarities we found...

Wolves eat meat, and so do most of us.  We both have canine teeth, although their canine teeth are much longer.

Wolves communicate with each other using body language, just like us.  They also use howling to locate family members, to alert other wolves of danger in the area, and for pups to ask their mothers for food.  Check out some of the howling we did in the video below...

Wolves are mammals, just like us!  They have fur that covers their body to keep them warm and get milk from their mothers when they are young.  We looked at fur from wolves and compared them to other mammals.

For more information on wolves in Minnesota, check out www.wolf.org!

Scarecrows!

We had our annual CCDS Scarecrow Contest this week!  You may have seen all of the creative scarecrows around the school.  If you missed them, here they are!

 Burro Class - Most Creative

Llama Class - Most Realistic

Billy Goat Class - Furriest Scarecrow

Chick Class - Best Use of Leaves

Duck Class - Lumpiest Scarecrow

Bunny Class - Cutest Scarecrow

Pony class - Scariest Scarecrow

Happy Halloween!

Fall Decorating

You may have noticed all of our Fall decorations around the school.  Did you know that they were all done with the help of the kids?  They are amazing helpers!  

 We pulled wagons filled with pumpkins and gourds, rolled hay bales into place, put mums around the school and helped clear out old plants.  Check out the pictures below!

Some classes also helped to create a hay bale maze.

And...added two special guests to try the maze as well!

HAPPY FALL!