Unschooling has been a great experience and one of the best parts has been the opportunity for Ethan to attend nature school. It’s five hours outdoors learning about nature and survival skills, things that we aren’t able to teach him ourselves. Plus, it’s great to have other adults around to mentor or teach him, too.
Nature School
Ethan has to pack a bunch of stuff for nature school and carry it around for the day. We’ve lightened his load considerably and Ethan hasn’t complained about his bag being too heavy.
This week, Ethan’s group did an epic hike down to the Seymour River and learned topography skills, too. I’m going to post the recap his instructor, Tom, sent us.
Tom’s Recap
The following is what Tom sent us after this week’s nature school:
What a fantastic day we had this Wednesday! This week we sent everyone home with the challenge to find a plant that the instructors don’t know and either draw it’s leaf shape in a notebook or bring a leaf sample.
Our morning started with a game of Night Safari. Each of us became nocturnal creatures moving stealthfully trying to sneak up on a hunter without being seen in motion. The hunter was focussed and would catch the slightest movement from the animals, but eventually with patience and skill we could get close enough to catch the hunter.
After our morning circle we has a snack while Tom shared the story of his time at a nature school for adults. He talked about the amazing Ghost River valley where he spent 10 days and his experience of doing a three day solo, alone on the land. During this three days he managed to lose track of his usual trail back to his camp from one of the special places he would visit. Tom shared about how he found out his way back to the camp after becoming lost.
We then split into our small groups:
Tom’s group went on an epic hike down to the Seymour River and north along the western bank. As we started our trek we looked at the trail map and got our bearings. Where is North, what direction does the river run, what landmarks can we use to identify our position? We tried to figure out the scale on a the map and thought it would be fun to think about how we would make our own map. We talked about how maps show elevation and went over to a tiny hill nearby and marked our topographic lines as they would appear on a map. As we started out decent deep into the river valley we decided to keep track of the elevation change. We decided our (imaginary) map would have elevation marks every two metres and a 1cm:50m scale. We used Tom with his outstretched arm as a measuring stick to mark when we had dropped two metres. Tom would run down the trail and the group would shout stop when he’d dropped down two metres below the previous mark. We counted 39 marks, 78 metres down! Then we remembered we would have to climb at least that much to get back out. We figured Tom’s step was about 1 metre and we counted his steps between each elevation mark and then figured out how that would look on a map. The shortest distance between markers was 13 steps (0.26cm on our map) and the longest was 205 steps (4.1cm on our imaginary map).
As we walked we noted familiar plants and ones less familiar. We saw a number of Red Elderberry bushes and were interested in how easy it is to hollow out the soft pith from the dead branches. It’s interesting for us to see a plant that is poisonous, yet also can provide food, medicine and material from building beads and other crafts.
After a well deserved lunch break we climbed out of the valley and made our way back to meet the other groups. Along the way we played clothpins ninja, each of us had a handful of clothspins and tried our best to attached these to the clothes and backpacks of our fellow group members without being noticed.
What a fun day of mapping, plants and exploration.
Planes
After getting cleaned up and having a snack, Ethan learned some new paper airplane designs.
Coding
Next up was more coding and updates to Ethan’s game, Beach Blast.
When the character jumps, Ethan made it so that he loses energy. Ethan decided to add energy balls to replenish the character’s lost energy.
The blocks in the air move up and down.
The black arrows fly across the screen so the character needs to stay on the higher blocks.
Density experiment
In one of the science books is a density tower experiment and Ethan wanted to try it.
For the first experiment, Ethan first placed a layer of dish soap and some plain water with blue paint added to it.
Then he added some olive oil.
He added more dish soap.
Then he wondered what would happen if he shook the jar and mixed everything up.
Eventually, everything separated except the water and dish soap, as those two things simply mixed together.
Next up was using something much denser for the bottom, rice syrup. And on top of the rice syrup was soy milk.
Dish soap once again.
Followed by some more oil. The dish soap settled in between the soy milk and syrup. Very cool.
Ethan’s Nature name
Before getting ready for bed, Ethan searched a photo of the common merganser, a type of waterfowl. I was curious as to why he suddenly wanted to find pictures of this bird.
He told us that common merganser is the nature name given to him by his instructor, Tom, at nature school
Ethan found the images and learned about how well the common merganser can dive and catch food. He also learned that the male and females have different colours and that the chicks are left to fend for themselves within weeks after being born.
So today was another full day of learning for Ethan. We’re happy with how unschooling is going for him, especially because it’s so great to see him learning pretty much all day long.
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