Mendocino Woodlands Trip by Marin Montessori School - 5/26-5/29/98

This page links to some pictures that I (Jed) scanned in from the trip to the Mendocino Woodlands camp that I took with the Marin Montessori "dome" children.

The trip up was pretty nice and pretty uneventful. We stopped a couple of times including once for lunch. It rained quite a bit after the first day and was pretty wet, but everybody still seemed to have a good time because there was so much to see and do. For example, if you looked in the stream you could see things like a frog and even catch all sorts of other critters (Giant Pacific Salamanders, Salmon fry, etc.).

On the tidepool trip we could see things like chitons, limpets, and anenomes, some crabs, some batstars and even an octopus and an abalone. The children were climbing all over looking at things during the low tide.

Things to do included challanges like ordering by birthday without getting off a log or guessing mystery objects on a night hike with eyes closed and all sorts of other activities like:

Even the adults had a had a great time. I am sorry I didn't get pictures of the dancing during dish washing (the kids really enjoyed cleaning up in the kitchen). The whole camp was remarkably well organized and the children well behaved (that is the waste wizard's chart at the right - "ZERO WASTE!, ZERO WASTE!, ...). Even the little rituals seemed to work with this age children. All in all an interesting, fun, and worthwhile outing - despite all the rain.