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A day in nature: tell us your day in a wood, along a river, on the seashore, in mountain or in desert places

We are waiting for your experiences and your narration. For students, teachers, but not only!

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Permalink Risposto da Tina Pannullo su 16 Febbraio 2009 a 17:52

This is description of the day that children spent at Parco Nord Milano

3rd grade – Piazza Costa Elementary School – Cinisello Balsamo
October 6, 2008

It's a bright sunny day today and is quite warm!
The children, almost sweating arrive in their meeting place – a farm house, and they go there by foot from their school to this park.

We move towards the woods, but we stop for a while under the sun to remember our names... and to set the purpose of this meeting.

What shall we do today? We need to find books in the woods, observe around, stroll and look for animals and plants....
At this moment we start to walk....

We stop along Lombardy Poplars' road. We try to keep quiet for a few seconds – just to listen if there is a bird around quite common in this park... Nothing! But we could look around and see if we could possibly find its tracks.
It's about woodpecker. As a matter of fact, someone notices some holes in the trees around us. There' s a lot of these holes and in some cases, they have seriously damaged the trees.

We enter the woods and immediately meet the “villages” The Big village at first, followed by the Rich one. We stop here and I start reading a page of the book referring to the village. “The man who planted the trees”.

When the story ends, we repeat all the most important part of it and then start getting ready for our activity.
We must collect a number of acorns - just as the farmer did in the story - and pick up also some other seeds and fruits.

During our search, we also find... a small dead field vole in the ground.

Here's the final collection.

Fruits and seeds of eight different plants: two types of oak (red oak and turkey oak), ash, alder, dog rose, eunonymus, strawberry, pokeweed.

These seeds will be taken to school in order to observe them, and as for the oaks, we count them and separate the good acorns from the bad ones, observe which ones had been eaten by worms and then count them again. This way we could keep the good ones in the refrigerator – so we could plant them by the start of spring.

We take our snack then proceed walking through the woods. Just for a little bit more because after a short while, we meet the Twins Village with two poplars (a black and a white). We read here a few excerpts from “The Grandmother's jungle”.

What do we have around us? Mainly a jungle!
Is it possible and desirable transforming it into a garden similar to that of Mr. Lindo?
There are contradicting opinions regarding this and we will eventually discuss this topic in school after reading the story-

A little further, we find another pole - the Memory's Village - with the book “Bandiera” (Flag)
Why is it called like this?
“Because we remembered here to meet Bandiera”
Or maybe it has something to do with the memory of the tree – and not ours!
We observe the tree near us – an ash tree – it has a lighter stripe that goes around the barks of the tree, a little above the ground. We also observe some vertical lines which indicates the presence of scars. It means that years ago, the bark had been practically removed in this tree – by who and with what, nobody knows.
Should we try to look for other scars in the trees?

We easily find some – others are even big, it would take years for a proper scar formation.

You should know the book entitled “Bandiera” because you've seen a theatrical performance of it.
We also read some lines of the book and we remember the names of the characters: most of all the Bandiera leaves; Solemio, Amicastella, Capriola, Ombretta and we try to find out why Bandiera didn't want to die in Autumn.
Mainly for curiousity sake: She wants to know what's behind Autumn (the snow, the cold, but above all, the new leaves that will sprout the following Spring)

What about you? What book would you like to bring and read in class?
After taking a vote, the choice ends up in “Granmother's Jungle”. But the teacher secretly hides away one of the other three books: “The man who planted the trees”.... Reading is really addicting!

For every book that goes away – another comes back: the one entitled “O livro da Selva” which you read last year and you wrote some interesting comments.

Time flies and it's time to go back to school.

Bye bye to everyone.!

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Permalink Risposto da Tina Pannullo su 27 Maggio 2009 a 22:20

go and see the video that we made in the park
andate a vedere il video che abbaimo fatto al parco nord .
http://greenleaves.ning.com/video/2456745:Video:3682