Weekly Activities

Near the beginning of our Now and Then unit we discussed homes and what the earliest of humans lived in. Cedar group made a cave that was small enough to be inside CM, but big enough for one or two children. One child said the cave was missing something inside. They had seen special markings that belong in a cave in a book one time. We looked up what cave drawings look like. Then they drew their own to add to our CM cave.

Today we went into our beautiful forest beside CM for our group time. We brought special 'forest books', to draw and record what we found. We wanted to know how old some trees are. One way to find out the age of a tree is to count it's rings, but the tree has to be cut down to measure this way. To measure a tree a different way, you wrap a tape measure around the tree. This will measure the circumference. You use the circumference to find the diameter (circumference divided by pi (3.14). Then you multiply the diameter by the growth factor. Different trees have different growth factors. Cottonwood is 2.0, Maple and Oak are 3.0, Red Maple are 4.5, Cherry are 5.0, Dogwood are 7.0 I decided to take an average growth of 4.0, and use that for all the trees we measured. So our measurements are We started with a VERY big tree. We looked at the features of the tree so we could draw it in our books. It's branches were so high up, so high that we couldn't use them to ...

We read a fantastic book called, 'Wait for me, say's Maggie McGee'. It's about a girl who is the youngest and smallest in her family. She had a hard time being so small. There were so many things she couldn't reach or do because of it. But then she starts growing and stretching. Because of her resourcefulness and kindness, she gets three wishes. She saves her last wish for something extra special, something that will take a long time, but it finally does. She becomes the tallest in all her family. We began a conversation about Cedar groups wishes when they get bigger. Some children thought of their parents and what they see them do because they are big. Some children wish to drive a car when they are big. Some want to have children of their own.  Maggie was the smallest in her family but grew up to be the biggest. We drew a tree (to connect our growth to our tree measurements we did in the forest). We all measured ourselves and anyone else at CM tha...