Fun! Fun!
On our Friday walk last week, we pulled a chunk of burnt wood out of the forest and took it back to the classroom. 
Today I pulled it out and put it on the table with a spoon, mortar and pestle, magnifying glasses and some paper.
Kindergarteners love to destroy–I mean deconstruct–stuff. I helped them lever off pieces of the burnt wood and they did the rest. They smashed it up using the mortar and pestle, added snow, and smashed it up some more. They drew with the charcoal (a surprising discovery for many of them) and finger painted with the sludge they made in the mortar.
I put a few other finds out on the table as well….a chunk of moss, a tree fungus (shelf fungus?), some fern fronds and some dried chunks of mud. A centipede crawled out of the fungus, much to the delight of my kindergarteners. Several watched it intently with magnifying glasses until it was time to clean up.
The other happy addition to my class today was snow. I scooped up some of what remained from our snowy Tuesday and popped in the water table along with a few play dough tools. The children enjoyed putting on their mittens and playing around making caves and ice cream and lakes and roads for cars. Easy and pleasurable in an environment where snow is a special occurrence.
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