marlboroschool.net

MONDAYS

(April 30, May 7, 14, 21, 28, June 4)
1. Masters of the Yearbook w/ Pam Burke. Calling all students with photography, layout, computer and sales skills to help put together the best MES yearbook ever. We’ll be working until the end of the year to produce a beautiful, professional yearbook that the class of 2012 will cherish! This venture will be a student-driven, student-designed program.
Open to all 7&8th Graders

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Tinder bundle ready for a coal created with a bow drill.

As a final closure activities, the students created a “shout out poem”, a toast to our time together. Each of us made a tinder bundle and blew it into flame without using matches and with friction or flint and steel. Together, we built a teepee fire and roasted a whole chicken, potatoes, garlic and apples with chocolate scat (fox and raccoon) for dessert! We practiced Sit Spot and sensory awareness games and we enjoyed spectacular views and seasonably warm, sunny weather.

Toast to 6 weeks of winter Fire & Stone

Here’s to…
bobcat habitat
snowball fight fun
making a giant snowball
sliding on ice was really fun
learning how to make tinder bundles so we can start our own fires
cooking around a fire: chestnuts, apples, chicken, squash, sausages, hotdogs, garlic, potatoes, marshmallows
chestnuts popping and exploding
eating balsam fir pitch
really glad this program exists, to come out into the woods, have a lot of fun, learn things, play games with each other
all the wonderful places we’ve been able to go to, like Hogback
being able to come to Hogback and have fires
adults: Patrick, Lexi, Liz, Kristina, Jeff, Hal
kids: Alice, Daniel, Syrus, Zinabu, Sam, Paul
Daisy the dog being a really good companion
an awesome bunch of weeks
hooooooo hooo hooo hoooooooooooooooooooooo

Stacking the core of a tipi fire and in the distance, making a tinder bundle.

The completed fire ignited by a friction coal transferred to a tinder bundle then set inside the tipi.

Chicken on a spit roasting over coals; potatoes and garlic in the coals; apples on a stick

Stealth game: Camouflage Stalk

It was bright and blustery. The clouds came and went, one moment it was spring with the heat rising off sugar snow like a summer beach, then, sudden wind and clouds, blue turned to slate and it was frigid February again. We squatted, stubbornly spinning wood on wood until the muscles in our arms were on fire and the small, growing pile of char in the notch of our bow drill hearth began to smoke and burn. Cyrus, Daniel and Zinabu traded turns at blowing tinder bundles into flame, sparked by friction and flint and steel: shavings of molten steel, ignited by a sudden separation and sent skittering across flint until one spark, embedded and glowing, became a red ring in black char-cloth. After an hour or so, everyone was hungry. We made campfire lunches: sausages, hot dogs, chestnuts, potatoes, sandwiches wrapped in foil and heated by the fire.

A longmatch ready to transport

With tongs made of a split beech branch, we lifted a tiny coal to ignite a false tinder fungus. Fomes fomentarius is also known as horseshoe, horses hoof or birch bracket fungus. The inner layer is spongy and flammable. Boiled in niter, urine or ashes, the inner layer was called amadou (to coax or influence by flattery…love is highly combustible!) and was pounded into felt that was made into clothing, used for surgery or used for tinder. The dried, whole fungus can be touched by fire to smolder for many hours, nearly impossible to extinguish. Wrapped in punky wood and bark it can be made into a long-match and it was used to carry fire from place to place in days gone by. It was found among the survival gear of Otzi the Iceman, from the Copper Age and Europe’s oldest natural mummy. We let our long-match idle for about two hours. When un-wrapped, it was warm. Shortly, a wisp of smoke emerged. With the help of wind, breathe and minutes, it burst into flame!

Making the longmatch, encased in punk and bark

Smoking a deer hide

The kids were excited by the rugged beauty of a fur-on deer hide that was fleshed, salted and rolled into a tube. We cut poles to make a tripod and hung the hide over the fire. A section of woodstove pipe filled with punky wood and smoking fiercely was propped inside. The hide began to soften after about two hours. It will make a warm ground-cloth for sitting or sleeping on. All the while, we played games of Clothes-pin Coupe: clipping a clothes-pin to an unaware victim, Eagle Eye, Flash Flood and a Red Light, Green Light style stalking challenge.

Building a log cabin fire

Blowing a tinder bundle and coal into flame

Bow drill, double bowing

Fire and Stone Winter Sports 2-6-12

Sliding on ice

Our most distant landmark, the sun, was in the south when we left the windy parking area of Hogback,

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We headed west from Sunset Lake through a hardwood forest of beech, maple, birch and ash, cross-hatched by chains of tracks in the snow: deer, fox, weasel and more. Earlier and indoors, we looked at the Newfane USGS topo map and looked at our destination and discussed contours, elevation, scale, longitude and orienting the map to the landscape using a compass.

read on for pictures and more!

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