Survival For A Day

This year in school, our kids got to go on a Survival Day at a nature center.  It's a full day of outdoor activities and fun, life learning skills.  I got to go and spend the whole day with them, it was so much fun!  First, they read the book "Hatchet" by Gary Paulson, and then this outing goes along with the book!

We learned how to:

Build our own shelters from found items.

We were taught which direction your opening should face (the sun), where on a hill you should build your shelter (not on the bottom or side).

How you should try to use something already there to build off of (like a dead tree).

We used donated used Christmas trees, pine boughs, dead tree limbs on the ground and leaves.

After assuring our shelter situation in a survival time of need, we moved onto:

Fire.  Which isn't as easy to start as they show on tv.  And we had a flint and whetstone.  5 attempts and we had it though, thanks to one young fellow who had found some milkweed to start us off, and a piece of lint we acquired.  Whew. 

Also, we learned of the many different ways to start a fire, how to preserve firestarter and different places you can find fire starter.  Pretty cool stuff to know.

Here are 3 different ways of laying out your wood to form a fire:

Ours, of course, was the triangle shaped one (but then, I'm sure you could tell that right away!).

After a huge lunch, we went onto our 3rd survival activity.  And no, thank goodness we didn't have to catch and eat our own food.  Thank you wonderful lunch ladies who packed our lunches!

This is me.  In my Mama Bear snowshoes.  Or so the guy in charge called them.  They were a step up from the Goldilocks shoes and below the Big Bear shoes.

We learned about different styles of shoes for different areas of the country, what they are made out of, and how to walk/run in them.



During our 18,000 mile hike, we stopped to see a porcupine den, which was a big hollowed out tree.  The critter had scat all over in front of the entrance and underneath.  This, of course, was the talk of the walk for all the kids. 

Someone said they saw the porcupine up in the big tree next to the den, which gave everyone something to do for the next 15 minutes.  Here is the tree....can you spot it?

One of the thrills of the walk....the spotting of a fairy hole in a tree!:

We weren't finished yet!  I left my camera in the vehicle accidently, but we did have another fun activity that nothing to do with survival....except it would provide you with a very fast way down a hill if a bear was chasing you.....can you guess what it was?