Hello MLA families,
I missed a week, oops! It might be because I am distracted by Mountain SOL receiving a…
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC GRANT WOOT WOOT WOOT
It is, as always, a blessing to be able to work here and spend this time with your children, learning outside from a place of joy and passion!
So, for the last three weeks, we have learned about food in the mountains. We hiked through our mountain and pretended that we needed to find our own food to eat, and that our classes were family groups. What could we find for food, forage, or fodder? We found crab apple and pear trees, hawthorne trees, hickory and black walnut trees, and wild grape vines. We learned about Paw Paw trees and even got to try some. Some of your kids did indeed love pawpaw, and some did not (and we enjoyed their faces.) We talked about how that wasn’t very much to eat, so we should probably have some livestock and a garden. What would we feed our livestock?
We then moved on to thinking about how we would preserve our food. Our youngers got to make a pretend fire and fish for pretend fish and then “salt” the fish with dirt or dry it to make jerky! They “Ate” one “fish” for one day and then used their math skills to see how many they had left over. Was that enough for them all to eat all winter? Noooope. Then our older kids worked together to begin the process of building a real spring house. They found and dug out a spring, re trenched the drainage, and then collected stones to line the ditch and the well spring.
This week we will be working on submissions for an online celebration of International Mountain day! These submissions consist of an art project they are doing with Mr Ryan as well as some text about what our Appalachian mountains mean to them. We will also organize a celebration during the day on December 8th as well as a concert at the Gluck Theater at the Mountain Lair. So many fun things that we get to do together to celebrate “Gratitude and Resilience” as mountain humans in Appalachia!
Also, here is a link to our winter clothing fundraiser that includes 1) our amazingly warm and water resistant black hoodies that you have probably seen us all running about in, 2) The orange Mountain SOL hats that are fuzzy and donated (thank you), and 3) zip up hoodies back by popular request!
As always, thank you for the time with your children. There is no greater gift!
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