09/12/2019
First lesson of outdoor class: Don't get discouraged.
Or at least try not to get discouraged. Lesson plans for studying clouds were prepped and ready to go for this week. Cotton to represent cumulous clouds, pipettes to practice hand strength and collecting and dropping water, a blanket to lie down on outside to observe the clouds, and a small pile of cloud literature.
Well, after squishing, sniffing, and throwing our cotton clouds, no one was very interested in taking them outside to learn about saturation and precipitation. No one was very interested in lying on the blanket to gaze up at the sky, either. Instead, we- ran as fast as we could across the field, picked seed pods and observed the seeds inside, chased butterflies, relaxed on logs and peeled up the bark to observe the beetles and bugs crawling underneath. We swung on our swings and pretended to fly into the clouds. I pointed out cumulous, stratus, and some ominous cumulonimbus clouds. By the end of the day we were given the chance to observe a fantastic rainshower, courtesy of those cumulonimbus clouds.
I am reminded that being outdoors often requires no lesson plans, and that no lesson plan could replace the knowledge gained by exploration.
We moved our cloud lesson indoors today, and it was a huge success ;)
