Natural Building Workshop: Faeries, Pixies, and Nymphs
Hi everyone!
Learning, exploring and playing with natural building methods alongside your children today was such a beautiful, joy-filled experience. Here is a recap on how the day went…
We started the morning by getting to know some of our materials. We learned how to stack stones to make a stone wall (“cover the cracks!”), stack wood, rake dry grass, and we were introduced to cob.
After the children gathered in a circle, Charlotte and I explained that we would be learning about building today and specifically, building homes. To teach the children how to build a house we used the analogy of what we wear in cold weather: the foundation (stones) are the “boots,” the walls (cob) are the “coat” and the roof bark, stone slabs, straw etc) is the hat.
We discussed the materials of each piece of the house and we learned that cob is a mixture of sand, clay, straw and water. The children found it fascinating that we sourced the stones and clay we would be using, in the woods of the surrounding area. They especially were surprised that clay comes from the ground beneath us!
After a lesson on cob, we pivoted to the question of why we would be making houses today… for the fairies! After we walked to our building site and had snack over the book “Child of Earth, Child of Fairies” by Jane Yolen, we got straight to building our village. The first plan was to make a big meeting center for all fairies (perhaps “the Elf King’s home,” “the school,” “the church,” or “the grocery store.”) While some children stacked stones to make the foundation, others stomped the ingredients for the cob using dance moves, twists, turns, stomps, and running jumps.
Next, the kids formed the cob into balls and worked in an assembly line to transfer the cob balls to the foundation in order to make walls. All the while, we sang, laughed and made plans for our village while working.
Around noon, we had lunch by the river and read stories about fairies. At one point, one of the children told everyone to look up since he saw a golden fairy in the trees. In reality, it was just a tree cracked in half with exposed golden bark, but all the children were convinced they were seeing a fairy… it was very sweet and clearly increased their enthusiasm for building our village!
After a hike to look for decorative treasures and running game to warm up, we set off again building, making another batch of cob and many more buildings in our village.
The day closed with a lesson on natural paint- making and decorating the village. We made paint using flour & water with tumeric, beet juice, cocoa and clay. It turned out great!
Thank you so much for such a wonderful day building and embracing nature with your children. We loved seeing so many kids from our past and present BOPN classes connect/reconnect and share in this special day at Cow Common. We would love to have another event like this on a future day off, so please stay tuned!!
Best wishes,
Keara & Charlotte