June 2023

“The main thing is that the groups should contain different ages, because it has great influence on the cultural development of the child. This is obtained by the relations of the children among themselves. You cannot imagine how well a young child learns from an older child; how patient the older child is with the difficulties of the younger.” —Maria Montessori


Class Updates

Water Class—I always enjoy late Spring when they shed their gear and a pack of independent self sufficient little wildlings appear before my very eyes. These precious beings made it through the dark cold winter and gained a true sense of resilience. We have earned the sun and with gratitude we relish these days.

Earth Class—The Earth kids have been writing and illustrating some pretty phenomenal works of fiction over the past couple weeks. Students created their own tiny books and got right to work. Imagination and cooperation are turned up to eleven in the Earth Class, and everyone is reading! Eight of our thirteen Earth students will be graduating from the Earth Class and starting as Air Class kids with Ms. Audra this fall!

Air Class —The end of the school year is always an exciting and bittersweet time. I’ve been soaking up these last few weeks with the Air Class as our small crew of nine. They will forever be my first Forest School Class! Predator Prey went off without a hitch thanks to the Air Class and all their hard work put into their maps. We also couldn’t have done it without all the parent volunteers and teachers - THANK YOU! Everyone had a blast! We’ve also been practicing Contra dancing for the end of the year shindig and working hard on finishing our last project: How Things Work!

Fire Class—Can you believe it's June Fire Families? The Fire Class is delving deep into the world of Plants for the last few weeks of school, and will be discovering all parts, processes and mysteries of plant life. Lots of great experiments that I am looking forward to! Fire Class has also been putting forth such great effort at learning to read and write and are making huge gains in this area.


Predator & Prey

Predator Prey was a complete success! We could not have pulled that off without parent volunteers. Air class hid almost too well.

Heidi Mckay