Visit from Jay Avis: Survival Expert

On September 23rd we had the honor of having Jay Avis come visit us at Waynflete all the way from Vermont. We think Jay could beat any survival expert in anything. Jay goes out into the wilderness for long periods of time with nothing but a knife to whittle tools to help him through his tough, fun, experiences. We met Jay through Kai's husband, Chris. They met at Chewonki. He visited because we are learning about local foods and wild edible plants. The character Sam Gribley from My Side of the Mountain is doing a lot of the same things Jay knows how to do.

Jay showed us how to make clothes out of hide and we learned that you need to massage the hide with brain from the animal or eggs to soften it. Jay gave us a presentation at school and showed us edible mushrooms, homemade baskets, how to make a wood bowl from fire and coals, how to make string from milkweed fibers, and some cool shelters that some of his friends made. Then we went with Jay to the Fore River campus. He showed us how to make a fire with the bow and drill technique and how to use the atlatl and the bow and arrow. The atlatl is one of the oldest hunting tools ever, older than a bow and arrow. It allows you to throw a spear (dart) faster and smoother. We learned a lot about wilderness survival when Jay came to visit.

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Mystery Trip - 2025

Every year 4-5 takes a mystery trip. We don't know where we are going and we find out when we get there. Sometimes we go to the beach or a lake. The teachers kick off the conversation with absurd ideas. Sometimes it is an exotic place or a spot that doesn't even exist. This year they told us we were going to a bean factory, (which was knocked down) a farm that had a rare and elusive invisible sheep called cloud sheep, and that we would be working for the Morton Salt Company picking salt off the salt hay on the marsh. The teachers told us that after we help with the beans and salt we would get credit on the labels of the containers and we would get to bring home the wool of the cloud sheep. Last year's kick off was even more absurd. They told us we were going to a donut farm to plant donut seeds which were cheerios, go to have tea with the late Queen in England, go on a treasure hunt, and visit the cheese museum. After telling us where we were going the teachers gave us a pa...

Self Portraits

A few weeks ago, we started creating self portraits. We learned about Romero Britto and his style , which includes patterns, bold lines, bright colors and simple designs. We all added food into our Romero Britto-inspired self-portraits because we are telling people about ourselves and our favorite foods. We are doing a study called Local Foods and we are adding foods, sometimes in repetitive patterns, to our portraits. We hung the portraits in our classroom and now we can see the similarities and differences in our class. By showing our favorite foods others can relate and connect to us. We assembled the foods into bright patterns and divided the sections with thick black lines like Romero Britto. We also hid other things we like into our self portraits. We put as much detail as we could into the pieces to show our identities. After we finished them, we mounted them on black paper and hung them on the wall. We hope you like them. This is our first blog post of the year and we work...

Grandparents And Friends

We are Kat and Suzy! We are going to be bringing you this information about Grandparents and Friends Day!!!!! On May 2, 2025 at 8:47 our Grand Friends came to Waynflete. We go to share what we are doing in school like RQs, which stands for research quest. That is a research project where we read, take notes, and write an essay. But that's not our focus of this blog so we will get back to Grandparents and Friends Day. We did some writing together, shared some math, and gave tours of our classroom. Our grandparents and friends were happy to see us and they said school was different for us than it was for them. We also had Pachanga with our grand friends. We all sang songs together like when people from Nancy's home station went up and showed everyone the motions to peace like a river in sign language! And that's a wrap! by Kat and Suzy

Tales Of A 4-5 Something

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