Our Environment

It’s Forest Friday again! We always love exploring Arisugawa park and today there were a lot of new interesting things. First, in the early morning, we made Gyotaku with the plastic fish we have. (Gyotaku is a traditional form of Japanese art that began over 100 years ago as a way for fishermen to keep a record of the fish they caught) We used the fish to mark the number of people we have in the family. Before we knew it it was time to get ready for forest Friday!

We thought about what we might see when we were in the forest. S said, “Worms!” Maybe, we will- we’ll have to see when we get there. We guided our teachers through the neighborhood and found our favorite alley. The alley had a puddle of water. Since it was an amazing sunny day most of us didn’t wear our rain gear except L. She insisted on wearing her rain gear and it paid off. We all debated if we should jump in but we didn’t want to have wet shoes. So we asked L to jump and if she could jump bigger. H started it by saying, “Jump for H!” As L made bigger jumps we stepped back so we wouldn’t get splashed. We turned it into a fun game. We could have stayed there all day but since there were neighbors there we didn’t want to bother them too much.

When we reached the forest we talked about what we can do in the forest. 1) Take care of ourselves. 2) Take care of each other. 3) Take care of our environment. We continued to walk in the park and right when we got there we saw an older man walking past us and all of a sudden the “hato” (Pigeons) gathered around him. What’s going on? We walked closer to the grandpa to see what he was doing. He was feeding the hato! There were so many of them! R was super interested in the hato she even touched it. The rest of us were walking around in the hato ocean trying to see what would happen. We looked at the food the grandpa was giving them and we saw rice and something yellow (corn) that we couldn’t identify. Hmm.. Kai told us this is something we can also eat but we shouldn’t eat this one. Maybe we’ll ask our parents what pigeons eat. While playing with the massive amount of hato H and S found a trail of ants. It was a long trail, and we followed it to find its home. R put a leaf down over the ants to make a tunnel for them.

We moved further down the path and found some roly-poly. There was also an ant that was carrying a dead fly that was double its size. It was super fast! K and A found a new area while chasing the hato. They used sticks to herd the hato in the circular fence. A shouted, “We did it!” when they flew into the fenced off area. While that was going on S, C, and L found some raspberries around the area and started raspberry harvesting. Kai reminded us that we can take some but if we take all the raspberries there’s not going to be enough for the insects and there won’t be a chance for it to grow more. That’s also part of taking care of our environment.

On the way back we finally saw a worm but it was a dead one. We thought that maybe someone stepped on it. It didn’t matter if it was alive or dead we were still interested and wanted to touch it… and some of us did. The teachers told us that we have to wash our hands thoroughly with soap and water when we get back to school. That concluded our wonderful Forest Friday! There was so much to learn and explore in our environment even though we go there every week there’s something new. Hope you also have a chance to see/do something new today! Have a wonderful weekend!

XOXO,

Hato Wranglers Petals Class Children