Can You Build a Village and Protect it from a Flood?

Giving the "Mayor" of the village a break from all of the activities.

ECO has proved to be a great learning experience as we have tied many of the concepts about land, water and our wall unit into simulations at Hubbard Park. In mid-October our goal was to create a village along a hillside that was protected by walls or dams from rain and flood waters. 

Constructing walls proves to require a great deal of focus.

Some people manage to get their boots stuck in mud past their ankles and still manage to build a wall.

Adding "rainfall" to test our simulation...ask your child how his/her village survived the storm.

ECO Newsletter

Ken, our ECO leader from the North Branch Nature Center has asked me to share the October Newsletter with you via this link:

http://www.northbranchnaturecenter.org/downloads/ECO%20News%20October%2014.pdf

Rock Walls Rock!

Today Ken and Althea led us in a great lesson on rock walls. We learned that in the 1800s people around VT built walls for many reasons. Some walls were built as property lines, borders for a cultivated field, or to contain livestock. A property boundary was built from stones of relatively the same size and shape giving a neat and orderly look. Walls built for cultivated fields utilized both large and small stones. Often times these stones were removed from the field to make it easier to plow. Finally, if a farmer had to build a wall for livestock, he used large stones stacked together and sometimes wood fencing to add height.
The class was broken up into teams of 4-5 kids and asked to construct a village with a variety of walls. Ask your child what went well for their team as they worked through this task. Or what their team found as a challenge and finally, what he/she would do differently if given this task again.

*NEW* Student Learning Links ~ Using Blog Labels

As we learn more and work on our blog, we'll be using different "Labels" attached to our blog posts. When we add labels to our blog posts, you'll be able to view all of the posts grouped together under each subject.

In the right-hand column of the blog, you can see "Student Learning Links" with this list:
   ECO
   Recommended Reading
   Student Art
   Vermont Studies

Click on the subject you want to view, and... voila!  You can see everything we've posted on that subject.  For example, click on 'Vermont Studies,' and you'll be able to see all our Vermont Studies posts.

We may decide to add more labels throughout the year, so keep checking back for more.

ECO Day ~ September 22, 2014

Today was our first ECO Day.  ECO stands for "Educating Children Outdoors," and is led by staff from the North Branch Nature Center.

Today, Ken and Althea helped us begin exploring rocks.  We used Venn diagrams to consider ways of categorizing different qualities we observed in the rocks we found:  color, size, texture.  We also explored the usefulness of rocks as primitive tools, for grinding, cutting and abrading.  We discovered that there were lots of rocks down at the wet bottom of our wooded hill and pretty much none up on the ridge and on the slope.