High Park Nature Centre

Dear Parents, 

It was a great day for a field trip. We spent some time inside learning to look at nature with new eyes and then took a brief walk in the woods to hang our bird feeders and look for animal signs. On the way home, we spent some time in Lithuania Park, where many of the students built nests on the hillside and enjoyed outdoor play. 

Two of the stations involved matching cards. One was a game of concentration where students matched birds, and the other was a 3 way match between an animal, a picture of its tracks and a photo of its actual tracks in the wild. 

The next favourite involved using lard to pack a pinecone and then rolling it in seeds as a natural birdfeeder. 

 

Then, students practiced making a variety of animal tracks and guessing what animal matched each others' efforts.

 

 The favourite station, as always, was making another type of animal sign: scat (really just playdough with cocoa powder in it). Students guessed what type of scat each person decided to make.

 We played another matching game outside, before our hike, while we listened to see if the birds were coming for the feeders. When we finally returned for lunch, we actually saw a woodpecker for a while. It was kind of magical.

After lunch, we headed back up towards the school, walking this time, and stopped at Lithuania Park for a while to play and explore. There was hay in the park that some students used to make bird's nests for themselves, while others played on the play structure or rolled down the hill. 

This student found some twine and made an impromtu fishing rod

 Just before we left, we took a class photo (Staring into the sunlight seemed better than being backlit at the time).