Adorable 4th graders

This past week we had 156 adorable 4th graders here. They were pretty cute, and very typical 4th graders. They came with every question imaginable, and didn't always want to listen to the answer. However, they were excited about everything, and they never had to be convinced that something was cool. As usual, my field group was into looking for frogs and animals. They also got to learn about shelters, and how to build a fire. They all love it here.

One of my favorite conversations from this week was with a student at dinner. This is how it went:

Student: "When did you have your first crush?"
Me: "When I was younger"
Student: *list of all of her crushes shes had* "See that boy over there, I like him, I am going to ask him out."
Boy at Table: "I thought the boy was supposed to ask the girl out?"
Student: "Whatever, they take to long!"

I noticed also with this group there was a lot of gender stereotyping. They boys thought they were stronger, the girls thought the boys were annoying. They also clearly did not want to interact with each other. I had to have many talks with kids this week about the issue. I think in schools they are perpetuating the stereotype.

As a staff this week, we all participated in chop stick challenge. How it worked was everyone was given a pair of chopsticks. Any solid foods that you ate during the week had to be eaten with the chop sticks. We all played until there was one person standing. I made it until Wednesday night. I accidentally ate some food that I was using to teach a class :(. It was still fun though.

This weekend I spent some time with the staff, since this is going to be our last week together. I also, did a lot of cleaning and packing.

For our last week we have 2 schools coming. Both are coming for 3 days, and both are 5th graders. I am teaching jellybellyology, shark dissection, inside out kid, camouflage and staking, megastructures, soccer ball digestion, and shelter building. Its going to be a very busy week.

Then on Saturday I will be moving into camp. Our staff training begins on Monday morning. I am really excited and looking forward to the new adventures camp will bring.

Here are some pictures from the week:

Only 2 weeks left at Natures Classroom

This past week we had 90 6th graders. They were very nice children. They were much more skilled at listening then our children from 2 weeks ago. They all were very excited to be at Natures Classroom. They were from Connecticut. They arrived on Tuesday and stayed through until Friday. It was a week that required a lot of flexibility. With the exception of Wednesday it was very hot! Wednesday we had rain during the morning, humidity in the afternoon, and thunderstorms at night. We had to change all of the evening programs this week. The kids still had a great time, despite last minute changes.

My filed group was pretty great this week. We called ourselves the goofy goober and they enjoyed hunting for salamanders and edible plants. They were great at working together as well, so they were able to go to our ropes course on the last day. I had one child whose name was Ethan. He was quite an old soul. He wore a Indiana Jones hat all the time. He said his mom gave it to him when he was little, and he's worn it ever since. He also told me that his grandpa has 2 '57 Chevy's. Whenever he goes to his grandpas they work on the interior of them. Ethan told me "one day, one of them is mine."

This coming week we have 155 4th graders coming! They will be coming on Tuesday and staying until Friday. I am going to be teaching shelter building, shark dissection, soccer ball digestion, and laughing yoga. Laughing yoga is all about the science of laughing. You do several exercises with the kids to make them laugh and feel happy.

This weekend I am hanging out in Dartmouth at Retha's house. We have been preparing for camp. I only have 2 weeks left at Natures Classroom before I move to Plymouth for the camp season!

Here are a few pictures from the week:

The week of waiting

This week we had a group of very chatty 6th graders. Especially when they were all together. Other than that they were pretty cool. My field group was really into walking around and looking for frogs. Every week I have the kids decide on a team name, this week my field group was the purple pencil shavings. The kids also decides this week we needed a mascot. They went with the wood frog, because we found 2 on our first field group.

Our weather this week was not very nice. It rained everyday. When it wasn't raining it was hot and muggy. There were a lot of mosquitos out.

This coming week we have another group of sixth graders coming. They'll be here for four days. I'm going to be teaching shelter building, jellybellyology, shark dissection, and WWF. WWF is a class about animal adaptations. You have kids pick an animal, then they must buy adaptations for them. After that student need to argue/defend their animal to see why it's better at surviving. In the end you pick an animal to be the ultimate survivor.

Also, sorry about the lack of pictures. My photo uploader is not working correctly. All of the pictures can be found on my Facebook page.

Weekend with my parents

This week we had 180 7th graders. It was a lot of kids. For the most part try were not to bad. They had their 7th grade moments though. My field group and I spent a lot of time looking for new trails to hike. They liked feeling like they were lost. We did a lot of hiking and talked about survival skills in the woods. So I taught them how to track and stalk prey, build fire, camouflage, and shelter building. They had a good time for the most part. They definitely went home tired at the end of the week.

This weekend my mom and came to visit. We had fun exploring Salem, Massachusetts. It was different then we were all thinking it would be. All of the historical sites are spread apart and tucked away in the city. We had to follow a red line around to find everything. (I think we thought it be like greenfield village.) The coolest thing we saw was the cemetery and witch trial victims memorial.  That night we went to a traditional New England clam shack for dinner. Afterwards we hung out watching an Indiana Jones marathon. This morning they got a tour of Natures Classroom before heading out. It was nice to see them.

This coming week we have about 90 6th graders coming. I was told that they are very intelligent but struggle with social skills. It should be an interesting week. I am praying for good weather this week, it's suppose to rain!

A long week

This past week we had 95 6th graders come and stay for the week. We had the same school, different group of students, come here a few weeks ago. As a whole the children really struggled with listening. There were a lot of daydreamers. Thankfully I had a pretty good field group. They all wanted to be here and they loved just hiking around. We discovered a lot of new trails this week. I had a student named Mason who loved hunting. He helped teach our field group all about tracking deer. We also found several species of frogs this week. Every Wednesday we have an all day hike. It goes from 9:30-2, and we make pack out lunches. I take the kids to see our tornado damage from 2011 usually. When we sat down to eat lunch, one of my students need to use the facilatrees. I taught her how and sent her on her way. I started to get worried after awhile because had been gone for a very long time. When she came back she was laughing... She had gotten pee all over her jeans! Thankfully she was a good sport about it and wasn't embarrassed at all.

This weekend I had to work at camp. I was with Retha doing boating for the day. Our morning was pretty good. The weather was nice and all the girls were kayaking and having fun. Well sadly our afternoon was not as fun. It started to get windy and rainy. we had to rescue some peddle boaters who were blown to the opposite shore. We played team building games afterwards. However both Retha and I we soaked. We had dripping wet pants and puddles in our boots. After we finished up with the girls we went to Bass Pro Shops. We had many of the staff staring at us because we were still dripping with water. Thankfully they had pants on sale :D

This coming week we have 170 7th graders coming. I am teaching tracking/stalking, megastructures, jellybellyology, shark dissection, and cultural fair. Then this weekend I am going to be taking the fam to Salem, Massachusetts!

Here are some pics from the week:

This is an american toad

This is a 400 year old tree!!

When we were at camp we got to see an owl show. Here is a saw whet owl.

My soaking wet pants after rescuing boats.

The Nutella Narwhales

This past week was great! The children were awesome. They were 5-8th graders from a gifted and talented program. Most of them were very smart and were very interested in how to survive outside. My field group was made up of 5th, 6th, and 7th graders. Every week on the first day I have my field group pick out a name. This week they voted on the nutella narwhal's. Three of my girls really like the name so they wrote the following chant for us: "We are the nutella narwhal's, we make all the important calls, we are a mix of a hazelnut spread and a whale with a horn on the top of its head". We said at the end of every field group, and they even incorporated it into our skit for Thursday Night Live. Also, this week I had a child name Taevis in my group. He was the weird but funny awkward child of the group. On the first day his best friend of the group got very homesick and had to leave. He was very sad at first because he was also the person who Taevis would play spit (the card game) with on their off time. So we agreed that everyday after lunch I would play spit with him. He was great, he even designed our field group a logo, so we could make t-shirts.

This coming week we have a group of 90 6th graders coming. I am going to be teaching salamander gander, ultra mega structures, jellybellyology, Shark Dissection, and soccer ball digestion.

Here are some pictures from the week:

Back at my home site!

This week I was back at Hill Top with the regular crew! It was good to be back with everyone. We had a great group of 6th graders come for the week. They loved everything we did with them, and loved being outside. My field group loved catching frogs and finding salamanders. We also spent 30 minutes of field group, one day, watching a bunny. It was awesome. Thankfully our weather has been beautiful as well.

This weekend I worked for the Girl Scouts. It was a mom and daughter event. I ran games all dy which pretty fun. They were all on the younger side so we played with the parachute a lot.

This coming up week we have 35 5-8 grade students coming. It's going to be a bit of a different week because they are from the gifted and talented program. So the 8th graders are going to be teaching some of our activities for the younger ones. I'm going to teach jellybellyology, shark dissection, stream stomp, and mega mega structures. Mega mega structures I'm teaching as a double with another teacher. We are going to have groups build several 3D shapes, as apposed to everyone doing one shape. Stream Stomp is where we walk through the stream to find animals. I'm looking forward to it.

A bit of a crazy week

Well as I'm sure you've all seen, it's been a bit of a crazy week. Thankfully I was in a safe place during all of the events. I was at camp in Plymouth all week. I was working a weekend event and I was working for camp for the week. The weekend event entailed putting up platform tents through out the property. It was a good workout. I also helped in the kitchen at meals. On Monday, since I had the day off, I went to plimouth plantation. It's a replica of the area where the pilgrims first landed.  It was pretty cool and interesting to learn about the dynamic between the native Americans and the pilgrims. When we got back we learned about the bombings. We still pressed forward and jumped into our week of camp. On Tuesday we had create it day, Wednesday was fitness day, Thursday was all about science, and Friday was supposed to be mystery day. I did both teaching and counseling. On tuesday I was counseling for K-3 students! On friday morning at 6:30 am our boss called and said we were canceling camp and needed to start calling parents. It was a bit of a stressful beginning. One of the other camps associated with Girl Scouts were put into lockdown and stuck at camp most of the day. It was a day spent listening to the radio and hoping it would be over soon. We also found out the second suspect was a student at the school at which Retha lives. Her husband and her dog were evacuated and had to come stay with us for the weekend.

Thankfully my weekend has been less stressful and more relaxing. Yesterday I hung out with coworkers watching the red socks game. Today I went to purgatory chasm, which is a bunch of  rocky hills and caves you hike through, and mystic aquarium. It was awesome!

This week I'll be teaching at hilltop. We have 125 6th graders coming. I'm teaching camouflage, megastructures, shark dissection, jelly belly ology, and soccer all digestion. It should be fun times!

Surprise your Teaching!

As I said last week, I thought that I would be an extra helper for this past week. I was wrong! I received a phone call, at 10:30 Sunday night, from the person I worked for in the fall saying they needed me to teach there this week. The week was good but long. The teachers from the school wanted there to be programming from 7:45am-9:30pm. (Usually we end our nights at 9.) Thankfully I had a very good field group. I ended up teaching megastructures, jelly-belly-ology, cultural fair, pigeon dissection (GROSS!!), and egg drop. Egg Drop is a physics class where the children have to create a mechanism to keep an egg safe. Their mechanism is dropped from a 2 story building. All the classes were pretty cool, with the exception of pigeon dissection. I only taught that class because I was asked too. Also, megastructures was a mega-fail this week. Because I had signed up for classes the day the kids arrived, I didn't have time to go check the amount of newspapers the site had. I found out as I was teaching class that there were not enough. Thankfully we had enough to build a small structure, and the kids enjoyed it.

On Wednesday we had our underground railroad simulation with the kids. I was signed up to play the role of a grifter. Basically, when a group of kids came by I tried to get them to give me money. Well I was waiting for the last group to come and I heard an animal in the woods walking around. I figured it was nothing to worry about. A few seconds later I realize its a coyote... and its now growling at me. As I stood there frozen, thinking of an exit plan, the final group showed up. Thankfully they scared away the coyote. It was terrifying! I am not sure what I am doing that keep attracting wildlife!

This week, I am working with the girl scouts. I started on Saturday, and work through until Friday. We had a group here putting up tents this weekend. Starting on Tuesday we have April Vacation Camp. I'm going to be running activities on some days and being a counselor on others. It should be a lot of fun, plus I am going to be meeting some girls that will be at camp this summer.

Today after work, myself and some of the other staff went to Plymouth rock. Thankfully they warned me that it was going to be smaller that I thought. Tomorrow morning I am going to Plymouth Plantation and working on planning summer program :D

As always here are some pictures from the week:

Dancing with the Woods

This past week turned out to be a very good one. We had a small group of catholic 5th and 6th graders come for the week. They were very well behaved and cute. I had 9 children in my field group who loved hiking in the woods. We found slugs, salamanders, frogs, and lots of deer and coyote tracks. We also had an all day field group this week. It is a 41/2 hour field group, instead of two. The kids all make pack out lunches and we eat off in the woods somewhere. This week me and my field group went to the blow downs to hike through. (The blowdowns is a section of property where a tornado went through  in 2011.) All was going well while we hiked through until we got to the bottom of the hill, where it turned into a swamp. At one time or another we all fell in the water attempting to balance on the smallest of branches. Once we found the driest path out we then got lost traveling in the woods. Eventually, after deciding to hike straight, we ran into a trail. The kids all thought it was super fun thankfully. No one was upset at being wet or lost. This week we also had TNL, which is a night where field groups prepare skit and preform them for one another. My filed group made up a skit called "Dancing with the Woods", a play on dancing with the stars. The 3 students that were contestants danced with various types of tree branches. They had one of the teachers in tears from laughing so hard.

Next week we have a group of 84 6th graders coming. I will be a "plus one" for the week. Basically I will not be teaching or leading a field group, but just helping out where help is needed. It should be a good week.

This weekend should be a good one. I am making baked spaghetti for friends tonight, and pannukakku for the staff brunch tomorrow morning.

As always, here are pictures from the week:

This is a picture of the blowdowns.

The week of contagious children

This week we had adorable fourth and fifth graders with us. However, they also brought with them a cold and flu virus. Within my field group of 12 students, 5 of them were sick, and 2 of those children had fevers. We sent 4 children home over the week that had fevers of 103.2, all of whom had one point taken my afternoon class! So needless to say I ended up with a cold by the end of the week. Other than thier germs, the children were very cute and well behaved. On the first day the teachers were worried about one of my children, Andrew. He is unmedicated for his ADHD and makes weird noises. He ended up ring totally awesome! He was super smart and remembered everything he learned in classes. He really liked learning about shelter building, so I had him teach field group one day. He taught us about BLISS, which is an acronym used to teach kids about what a good shelter needs. It stands for blend in with surroundings, low silhouette, insulation, small and secluded. The kids really enjoyed him sharing that with us.

This come week we have 35 5th graders coming. I, thankfully, will be teaching. It's our first 5 day too! I am going to be teaching camoflauge, which is about how animals disguise themselves in the wild, inside out kid, jelly belly ology, shark dissection, and soccer ball digestion. There are only four of the staff tht will be teaching too, so I might play ukulele for the kids each night for quiet sing :)

I hope everyone had a great Easter. I had the joint all to myself this weekend. This morning I even made some pannukakku!

Here are some pics from the week:

To the capital

What a week! It's been both crazy and exciting. Also, very busy, hence the late post. Last week we were supposed to have kids Tuesday through Friday. However, a large snow storm was predicted to hit on Monday night so the school cancelled and decided to come on Wednesday instead. It turned out the weather prediction was wrong and, we only ended up with 4 inches of snow. The kids finally arrived on Wednesday morning and they were all excited to be here. My fellow teachers and I realized quickly the group was going to be a handful! Half of them were loud and crazy, and the other quiet and barley spoke. All of us struggled with our kids and weren't really sure if they were even having a good time. When Friday arrived we were all emotionally drained from the kids. There evaluations were okay, nothing very funny or cute on them.

This week we have 130 adorable 4th and 5th graders! I'm teaching jelly belly ology, shark dissection, soccer ball digestion, and cultural fair. Cultural Fair is a class where you talk about what is culture and teach the kids games from around the world.

As most of you know I had an amazing trip this weekend in Washington DC. We went to the Smithsonian museum of air and space, natural history, and American history. We went to the White House, Washington monument, Vietnam memorial, WW2 memorial, and the Lincoln memorial. We also went to the Holocaust museum and explored the city art sculptures as well. I'm going to be posting pictures throughout the week on Facebook. Finally, as most of you also know, I saw President Barrack Obama fly over my head and land in the backyard of the White House. It was an awesome thing to see. I'm already planning my next trip back!

I hope everyone is doing well! Happy early Easter!

Back in the Habit

It feels good to back in the swing of teaching again. Overall I had a good week! My field group was a little chatty but, mostly awesome. They loved building fires and playing silly little games. ( I was glad that we had so much fun together, the group as a whole were very needy. We had to send a few kids home for fighting. We also had some very clicky girls.) My field group loved building fires so much we did it twice on field group. The second time I had the tell me how to do it and then they got to roast marshmellows and put it between two Oreos. I like to call them smoreos. My group also discovered some large fisher cat prints one day. Hopefully I never run into the animal. They are apparently very vicious if they feel threatened. Thankfully they are independent and don't like humans so they stay away.

This weekend I had a great time celebrating St. Patrick's Day with the staff. We all got together for a  corned beef and cabbage dinner. We spent the evening listening to Irish music and hanging out around the fire. 

This coming week we are being joined by 165 6th graders. I'm going to be teaching jelly-belly-ology, inside out kid, soccer ball digestion, and just plane fun. Soccer ball digestion is a class about the digestive system. I'll simulate digestion by putting a veggie burger and cola inside a zip lock bag, and then kicking that around in a soccer ball. I think it'll be a good week! 

Here are some pictures from this week: 

First Week!

The first week with kid here went great! The kids were a good group to start our season with, they were smart, kind, and funny. This week I was a sleep in, along with Retha. Our job was to be there at night in case the girls needed anything and to plan evening activities. We planned a pj fashion show, natures classroom trivia night, and a crazy hair contest. The girls and teachers loved it. On the last night the girls were very sad they were leaving. We had to spend 45 minutes trying to get more then half of them to stop crying. We ended up just having to let a few of them cry themselves to sleep. That final morning we woke up to a foot of snow! The kids were delayed from leaving. The superintendent of thier district wouldn't let them leave because of the liability of driving in bad weather. We entertained them for an extra two hours with random skits and stories.

This weekend I have spent recuperating. I caught someone's cold last weekend at the Girl Scouts lock in. I've also been preparing for the week to come. I'll be teaching! We have 80 5th graders coming. I'm going to teach grossology, megastructures, shark dissection, and new class. My new class is called just plane fun, it's about the physics of airplanes. In the end the students get to make paper airplanes!

Here are some pictures from the week: