Week 5: Outdoor Play Provocation Part 1 of 5 -- Getting Ready

I was so excited about this assignment. I love the Reggio Emilia philosophy, and often set up invitations and provocations to play for my little one at home. This year we are doing two loose "programs" at home by way of preschooling my daughter in the wildschooling /forest schooling/Reggio styles, and both of these came together alongside this assignment. 

We are participating in Tinkergarten, and this week's play prompt for our Saturday Zoom Circle Time with Novalope's circle of seven other toddlers involved melting ice and freeing nature treasures while observing changing states. At the same time, we are in month two of the 2021 Kids Moon Club journey, and our story of the month has a strong emphasis on wildcrafting specific treats, specifically rosehip jam. Last but not least, of course, was the challenge to create an outdoor play provocation for our NBTC course.

I put all these things together...ice, water, mud, nature treasures, picnics of wildcrafted goods, changing states of things as we move through changing seasons...and came up with a day of mud and ice inspired outdoor play.

Photo: my little one playing in her favorite tree before starting our Day of Mud & Ice. (6 March 2021)

First things first: before we headed outside, we needed to make sure that all of our treats were prepared for our picnic. Earlier in the fall/winter, my daughter and I had gathered some rosehips and made a few small pots of jam. Earlier in the week, we had gathered some ingredients for a wild tea: juniper, juniper berries, red pine, sassafras roots, cloves and allspice from the kitchen, some of the dried rose hips that did not get turned into jam, and the like. 

Photo: our wildcrafted tea blend featuring juniper harvested by my little one. (6 March 2020)

We invited her grandparents who live next door out to play, and my mother offered to make our family biscuit recipe to serve alongside the rosehip jam and wildcrafted tea. We took her up on the offer, and also picked up a pot of clotted cream because we love a Devon style cream tea in this house! 😉 So all that was left was making one final treat to bring together our mud theme: homemade dirt pudding cups. 

Photo: making some delicious dirt pudding cups, and only eating half the batch before "potting." (6 March 2021)

With our treats ready and waiting for the picnic, we then ventured outside with our frozen treasures to explore the properties of moving from one state to another.

Photo: the finished product of our culinary labors = Godiva dark chocolate pudding with crushed Bear Bites chocolate graham crackers and fresh basil from our windowsill plant. (6 March 2021)