Woodland Holiday Class

We had our Woodland Holiday class this morning at our local nature center
http://www.county.milwaukee.gov/display/router.asp?docid=10115
We started out sitting on the pond (carpet) where each child selected a stuffed friend to hold. My older angel selected a beaver, and my little fairy selected a squirrel. Miss Bev. Then read a beautiful story (that we have at home too) called The Snow Tree (I have these winter tales books in a series, and they are beautifully illustrated with raised embossed pages). As each animal was read in the book, the child holding that animal got to go to the tree and decorate with the appropriate ornament. My angel with the beaver decorated with a piece of fur, and my fairy girl with the squirrel hung red berries on the tree. After story time the children get to do a craft, and today they put little ornaments on the pine cones. I'm going to put some pretty yarn on so we can hang it on our own tree. And finally it was snack time, so the kids were each handed a cut out Christmas tree cookie, and got to spread different colors of frosting on (and then of course eat it). As the high today is ZERO, we didn't take the class outside for a walk in the woods (and somehow, I FORGOT to put mittens on my little angel--bad mom! She usually tells me things like that:) On a really good note, as cold as it is today, it's a heck of a lot warmer than it was yesterday, as we had 40mph winds that made it unbearablely cold--about 25 below zero windchill--and on an even brighter note, contrary to popular belief, there are actually colder inhabited places on earth--check out today's headlines, brrrrr!

A visit to the coldest town on Earth

Founded by Mongols in the time of Ghengis Kahn, the town of Oymyakon is the coldest permanently inhabited place on earth.

The village has a population of around 800 and is located 690 meters above sea level and lies in a valley between two mountain ranges (the reason for the low temperatures). The name Oymyakon means "non-freezing water" because of the natural hot spring close to the village.

The temperature this week is pretty low and the temperature tomorrow is a chilly -63C which based on the stats at Wikipedia equals the record low for December.