Day 3

on Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Harbor Day! We began by finding our location on the campus map in their journals and getting familiar with a compass. Now, how do we get from here to the Pond?



Our first adventure of the day was embarking on the S.S. Debbi, making our way out to the middle of Mac's Pond. I tried out doing a sound map - they had to symbolize any sounds that they heard during 10 minutes of silence. There were plenty of dogs barking and children laughing in the distance to keep them busy depicting the sounds on their paper.



Everyone got a chance to crawl through the hollow log



We crossed the suspension bridge and dropped maple seeds off the edge, watching them helicopter their way down to the forest floor.






Down at the harbor, they got to explore for awhile. The boys were super excited about finding a shot gun shell among the rocks. They were a lot less excited when I took it away from them. We did some Andy Goldsworthy style art on the beach, although the morning tide hadn't washed up much for them to work with.




We did "Each One Teach One" back up the steep hill, where they each got the chance to become an expert in a plant and teach about it to everyone else. Making it up the hill, I gave them a scavenger hunt to do at the cemetery, and we talked about why we would even come here in the first place and what we can learn here. "Because our lives are made up of other peoples' stories!"




We stopped at the Mill Worker's Cabin to do one of my favorite activities, from the book Material World. The author of this book travelled around the world and looked at what an average family owned. Not only did he make lists of all their stuff, but he somehow convinced families to drag out everything they owned outside their home for a picture. The results were amazing. The kids passed around pictures of what families from Ethiopia, China, Mexico, Samoa, etc look like. We got into discussions about what the most important material things to them are (phones! Ipods, my XBox!) and compared them to what these other families had. They concluded that although many of the families in the pictures had much less stuff than they had, they still looked happy with what little they did have. They thought that the Indian family wasn't very happy because nobody in the picture was smiling, but I told them that a lot of Indians don't like to smile for pictures :)






We had been trying to solve the mystery of what happened here 100 years ago. They were collecting cultural clues as evidence that would help them discover the history of this place. Our last activity of the day was (besides eating chocolate chip cookies) watching the video about the mill at Blakely Harbor. Wait, there was a mill?

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