Magwood Forest School

Location

The Magwood Forest School is an independent home-based micro-school delivering Kindergarten level programming in the west end of Toronto, backing onto the beautiful woods of Magwood Park.

The school is not accepting students for the 2022-2023 school year. (updated July 17th, 2022). If registration becomes available, this website will be updated with the appropriate information. Please use the Contact Us form to ask any questions.

2021-What's been going on?

Classes have been operating since Sept 8th. Provincial School closures do not apply to Magwood Forest School.

On our first day, we cooperated on building a wood shelter, heaved a great big log through the woods and used it to put out a few "forest fires", saw a great blue heron in the Humber river, caught a cicada, shared our ideas about where river water comes from, explored colour using tissue paper, dressed up in costumes, read some favourite books and ate lunch twice. What a successful first day!

Highlights of the fall include meeting several toads (Toetops, Toetim, and Toadstripe) a couple of frogs (anonymous), and a chicken named Billy. We've counted many things and figured out how many crickets the toads have eaten by making a connection between counting, adding and subtracting. We have counted and labelled all of the stairs from the valley to Baby Point. (142) Now that spring is under way, we've been planting seeds and observing and noticing the changes and delights of the season. The sap has begun to run from the maple trees, the first of the butterflies have begun to fly and many insects and plants are emerging from the soil.

We've played with momentum and slope on the hills in Magwood Forest (that means we ran up and down stuff and slid down the hills on our butts) and we climbed some large root balls. We've seen hummingbirds, hawks, egrets, chickadees, nuthatches, herons, downy, hairy, and red-bellied woodpeckers, a kingfisher, and mallards and we've learned to speak blue jay (but it's hard to get the accent just right). We tracked a pair of deer from the playground, through the woods of Bird Alley and past the toboggan hill. We've had a great time in the thick, slick, dark black muck!

In December, we made a trip back to the cretaceous period to look for dinosaur eggs, using our own maps and devising our own plan to travel back in time. We lured a Trudon out of hiding by using meat and plants as bait (because they're omnivores), and took the train home in time for lunch.

We've made our own Alphabet book, written stories, performed stories for each other, read dozens of books, and written with everything from markers on paper to rocks on the river bottom. We've painted with watercolour and acrylic, and sculpted with oven baked and air-dried clay as well as mixed craft ingredients. We've transformed the remains of broken fairy houses into a great fairy condo complex and had an exhibit of our art in Magwood Park. There we also shared a couple of favourite songs with our families.

We have built some amazing things out of Lego and Gearbox building blocks, including some FLL (First Lego League) parts and some of our own creations. We even programmed a Lego robot to move forward and turn. We've learned to tell approximate time using the small hand on a (normal) clock, and thanks to a clock with birds instead of numbers, we've made out own secret time-telling system.

When covid restrictions prevented us from going inside, we moved our lunch table under a big awning and carried on with full days out of doors. We wrote and published alliteration books, and used ten frames to investigate numbers including real numbers like 16, and number ideas like infinity. We took advantage of the opportunity to make a mess by trying silkscreen printing, and action painting (like Jackson Pollock) on big canvasses in the grass. We've explored and enjoyed the magic of spring, as the goslings were born and the birds and wildflowers returned to Magwood Forest! We've found tadpoles, then froglets, and then frogs, and we're excited for the LDD caterpillars to become moths!

A full year of practicing and thinking about how to be a good friend and how to share our world well with all the people and all the wild ones, has created a class that feels like a family.

What a year! Thank you, my young friends.

Alison