Animals in Winter

Hello everyone,

We started talking about animals in winter this week, just as the weather here in southern VT started to illustrate the benefits of such practices as hibernation. We started the week off by heading to the forest and talking about what we know about animals in winter, and then we made a little offering for our forest friends who don’t hibernate, by hanging up peanut butter and bird seed dipped pine cones for them.

On Tuesday we went to the forest again and read Time to Sleep and played a hibernation game. 

On Wednesday we read Not a Buzz to be Found, and made our way in the cold rain down though the field to the pond and looked for hibernating insects. We found gall-fly larvaes asleep in their goldenrod stalks and even dug up some slumbering snails, tadpoles, salamanders and dragonfly larvaes in the cold, wet mud. 

On Thursday we had a bear buffet, made a shelter and had a hibernation nap in the very blustery snow and wind. We also made some paper bag bear hibernation caves.

The weather was challenging this week, but we made our way through it. Winter is coming to all of us here, and it’s time to start the practices and seek the comforts that take us through this season. Thanks for all the work that you do putting all the layers on every day! Keep it up, it's so important.

Next week we will be talking about migration and camouflage. Looking at the weather now, we will plan to head to the forest on Monday, and then we will play it by ear for the rest of the week. It looks like some rain and snow on Tues-Thursday so we'll see what comes as we get closer.