This week's Forest Kindergarten morning dawned crisp and cold.  Some children broke out their winter jackets for the first time and donned mittens and woolen hats.  There was just a slight breeze blowing through the trees along the meadow's edge, making the arriving children appear to be emerging from a snow globe filled with golden leaves.  Last week the children discovered walnuts in one corner of our forest classroom and spent a good bit of time figuring out how to share them and squirreling them away in great piles.  They wanted more time to "cook" them they said.  "We didn't get enough time to play!" announced one avid walnut hunter.  Later in the week some children discovered a pine cone shortage (there was only one) at the science table in our classroom.

     So this week, we took a collecting walk.  Instead of going to the Glen, where we cannot collect things, the children opted for a shorter walk across our school property and the Antioch College Farm to collect pine cones and osage oranges in an edge wood along an osage orange tree-fence row.  We stopped at the pine tree on the edge of the school drive first to collect pine cones.  On the way to find osage oranges, we discovered that there were milk weed pods opened up in the mowed pasture.  Just by lifting the fluffy, white seed ends and throwing them into the breeze, the tiny seeds would fly, aloft for quite a ways, before replanting themselves among the mowed grasses.  Children and milk weed seeds created the second snow-globe effect of the morning.  I hope the monarch butterflies will appreciate our efforts next fall.  

     Just as we reached the opening in the edge wood, with the children exclaiming, "It's a door!" our third and most magnificent snow-globe effect appeared in the sky above us.  A large flock of vultures, just beginning their thermal powered soars, wheeled and circled very close above our heads.  "There are hundreds of them!" one child declared.  We stood in awe, until the flock circled away on rising air currents.  Then we entered the edge wood.  It has been a good year for osage oranges or monkey brains, as some children refer to them.  I know them as hedge apples, but regardless, they were numerous and good-sized this year.  The children took what they could carry, and we returned to our forest classroom with arms and pockets full of walnuts, pine cones, hedge apples, and one red feather.  To cap off our morning, and aptly the beginning of our current color day--white--the children discoverd a basketball-sized puff ball growing very near our fire circle, and everyone had ample time to play in our wood that morning.