Our Arts & Science Homeschool Enrichment program during Winter and Spring trimesters was dedicated to World Geography — Africa. The diversity and abundance of Africa left the kids in awe and excited to travel there one day. The goal for our lessons was not only to have the children learn the information, but most importantly to inspire curiosity and self motivation to discover the world around us and beyond! What we learned was just an introduction to this beautiful continent and we desire to encourage our students to continue their own learning and discussions at home! Click here to see o ..read more

As we are wrapping up our 2022 fall trimester we wanted to share with you some of the photos from our STEAM program (Science Technology Engineering Arts Math), this fall it was dedicated to human anatomy. Skeleton clay modeling Our core project was playdough modeling of human skeleton. Over the years we developed and worked with the children on a number of playdough modeling projects on topics such as birds, hibernation, ant hill structure and botany. These projects are both science and art. Children find them fun and engaging, while slow pace of the step-by-step project offers deeper underst ..read more

“Children have a natural affinity towards nature. Dirt, water, plants, and small animals attract and hold children’s attention for hours, days, even a lifetime.” – Ben Hewitt, Homegrown We are excited to share the news that our forest school has adopted a pack of African Wild Dogs in order to help this wonderful, but critically endangered species to survive. Further in this post I tell a little bit about how this adoption came about. But first, I wanted to share this wonderful documentary about African Wild Dogs. The documentary is by Kim Wolhuter, and I highly recommend his other nature doc ..read more

Hello, If you are looking for a beautiful craft with fall leaves to do with children I got a wonderful little art project to share with you. It is a rather simple, but very beautiful forest craft. And it requires minimal supplies that don’t come from the forest, and could be easily done in an outdoor setting. Over at our school cabin we usually have various logs and old branches left from pruning of the trees, or from dead old trees that got taken down. I had a stash of slices from an old aspen trunk and this craft was a perfect use for them. If you would like to try this craft, but do not ha ..read more

Our outdoor school program in Palmer Lake has a little cabin right by the mountains. The school cabin is used solely for the purpose of the program, and not as a residence. It is a charming, almost fairytale-like environment with a beautiful outdoor space for playing under the canopy of majestic evergreens, working on art projects and learning about nature. “In every gardener is a child who loves to play in the dirt. In every child is a gardener ready to grow.” ~ unknown source In our Palmer Lake outdoor school location we start every day in the forest where children spend a few hours play ..read more

Last year in this blog I have shared the recipe we have used that included flour, vegetable oil, salt and citric acid. It was a good recipe. Also, importantly, it was a zero-waste recipe, so you could make it using the ingredients that come without any plastic packaging. But since then we have simplified our play-dough recipe which now only uses flour and salt. We found it work just as well, in some ways even better. It appears that the acidic ingredient makes the play-dough more silky to the touch. But at the same time it seems like the dough is a bit more springy, so as kids try to roll out ..read more

With the hot and dry weather conditions it seems like the leaves started turning colors early this year. And as leaves that started changing colors will fall off shortly anyway, we feel collecting them for crafts doesn’t go against “Leave no trace” philosophy that we try to instill in children. This past week we collected some very beautiful yellow leaves on our hike. I wanted to share here few simple little art projects we did using those leaves that the children loved. The projects could be done both while on a hike or nature walk, or at home/classroom. The only thing that wouldn’t work out ..read more

One of the projects we worked on during COVID lockdown this past Spring was expanding our outdoor classroom space. As a forest school we spend first half of our day in the forest and mountains. But around lunch time we hike back to our school cabin for some learning projects. Even before COVID outbreak we did most of our learning projects outdoors, rarely going inside the school cabin during the warm months of the year. We already had a set of tables and benches built underneath and around a beautiful evergreen in the school yard. There we had all our meals and worked on the art and craft pro ..read more

Keeping busy during the COVID break If you are following us on Instagram you’ve seen that we stayed quite busy during our temporary closure due to COVID-19 guidelines. Over the 3 months that the school was temporarily closed we built a green house, added a large flower garden, set up a beautiful new outdoor classroom and most recently I replaced a fence to go with our new sign. I haven’t shared anything about the fencing project over on Instagram, as it was probably most exhausting of them all Our old fence was badly bent by the deer jumping over it. And as I was in the process of installing ..read more

I’m very excited to finally get a chance to post about our new school sign. It’s been in the works for close to a year, as I had a very specific vision and it took time and finding the right people to make it come to life. But at the end it turned out so beautifully and it reflects the school’s ethos very accurately. Creating the sign I worked on creating the sign as the side project, so the overall process took a long time. I started on the process back in August 2019. I wanted a beautiful wooden carved sign for the school with our logo on it. After some search I can across this wonderful c ..read more