Final Trail blazer Session

Dear Trailblazer Families,

Thank you to families for supporting Trailblazers.  We had a marvelous time in the woods over the 4 week sessions.  We accomplished our goals of encouraging stewardship, exploration and discovery in the woods.  We marked a path to encourage others to follow our footsteps into GSB's back yard and appreciated the learning opportunities that nature has to offer. 

Mrs. Fake and I encourage you to support your child's wanderings in the woods, in school and out.  We have intentions of growing our efforts next year and would appreciate your feedback of what your child's experience of the program was along with yours too! 

Here is a link to over 60 photos.  They are not organized or labeled yet.  We will be providing a presentation to the GSBPTO at some point soon and will be finalizing this album over the next week.  Check in again. 

Session 4

Kindly,

Kristie Houghton

Trail Loop

We have officially broke ground to make a loop in the woods.  You can take the trail from the Christmas trees, then veer left, instead of right toward "Big Rock," and just before Salamander City, you can head left to the stream.  Trailblazers worked very hard today breaking this new trail, clipping with tools as well as moving large deadfall to mark the trail.  Once we got to the stream, we worked on fortifying bridges, reinforcing walls, and making the landing for jumping log safe.  We haven't quite figured out how to NOT get stuck in Mud Valley but luckily we have one more session for "Trailblazers."

I encourage you to take a weekend afternoon to check out the work that these second graders have accomplished.  They should be proud of their efforts, especially as they have made a tremendous contribution to GSB.  As parents, we can encourage our children to be outside in the woods AND we can encourage our school to get students into the woods.  A lot of learning happened today!  Thanks for allowing your students to participate!  We were so busy that we did not have much time to take pictures, but here's a link to the moments we captured:  Session 3

Session 2

Trail blazers are surfing their way into spring!
We worked on the trail out to the stream today, making corduroy paths, marking the trail with sticks and building our first bridge over the stream.  We also watched stream flow change as we removed deadfall.  Sarah Gladu from the DRA brought clippers to work with, which were a big hit in helping us to shape this neglected space into an invitation for other GSB students to explore.  Heading back to school, last week, we learned prey/predator for a walking game.  This week, we learned the flood game.

All in all it was a great day for working together and exploring.  Here's a link to more moments from the day:

Trailblazers Session 2

Welcome to Trailblazers

Welcome to Trailblazers. 

We had a great first session.  Each session will start in Mrs. Fake's room.  We'll have a healthy snack and then focus on a topic for thinking, writing and then discussion.  Today we talked about earth manners.  Students had great ideas about littering, not scaring wild animals and being safe in the woods.