Mushrooms Motivate Learning this Fall at Nature School
The children had found it! The place we had been searching for with compasses, the “Old Car Spot”. This is a depression in the land of Agraria, an ephemeral wetland, so named for the most prominent feature around: an ancient pick-up truck that has collapsed into a heap of metal over the years. The children know to leave the rusty pile alone, but it still offers enough personality to entitle the area. Outlined by cottonwood and hackberry trees, with water nettle and euwanamous vines carpeting the ground, this enclosed forest the size of a baseball diamond is perfect for free-play time. A small hill beckons the testing of gravity with games such as bowling with monkey brains (the grapefruit sized neon green fruits of the Osage Orange tree). There are enough downed honeysuckle branches to build forts and outline special small spaces, homes, lairs, and nests.
Last week during free-play exploration, a couple of All-Schoolers found a giant mushroom ballooning out of a large, downed tree.
“Emily- this looks like a large, golden brown pancake!” Meredith called. She and a few students were circled around it, eying it from an eagle’s view, sideways, and upside down. Imagine a huge flapjack, one served to you at a breakfast diner. You know the kind. One meant to serve you and another because it takes up the entire extra large plate on your placemat. This mushroom even has dark brown fry marks like a pancake!
I walked over to my backpack and grabbed the slew of pocket field guides I carry with me each week in a case of curiosity just like this one. The children folded open the laminated brochure-style guide, and scanned the contents of possibilities.
“Must be the Red Band Fungus again!” called one child, drawing from his past experience with another large bracket fungus that caught the attention of the group the week prior.
After a time of picking through possibilities, one child sat down with all of the guides, spread out like a potluck in front of him, looking through them with awe at the many creatures that call Ohio home.
“I didn’t realize we had these birds here!” he called from his comfy leaf coach under the grandmother cottonwood. One curiosity sparks the opening of awareness- a healthy snowball effect.
They kept looking. Then went off to build, roll more osage orange fruits down the hill, or secure the cordage around the group fort. Back they would return, to check out the mushroom again.
“I don’t know, it doesn't look quite like last week’s mushroom. That one was hard. This one is squishy,” observed another boy.
“Ya, and it doesn’t have the red band on it like the other one,” chimed in a pensive gal.
The answer wasn’t given, although Emily could have revealed to all. The question still lingers for the children, and that is Coyote Nature Mentoring in a nutshell: fostering questions that invite lingering curiosity. The answer comes when the answer is ready to be known.
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Note: We saw a few mushrooms that day. And if you’d like to know the answer, then read on! If you want to go searching in the woods or field guide for your own answers, stop here.
The flat and ballooning pancake we saw was Dryad’s Saddle, also known as Hawk’s Wing or Pheasant Back. It grows like a shelf from fallen logs and decaying tree trunks. A positive identification comes when you sniff a fresh one, or cut a small wedge from one and smell melon. Watch this great video from my favorite mushroom youtuber, Adam Haritan of Learn Your Land channel.
Another fun fungus-like friend that we spotted on our wanderings was Wolf’s Milk. Found at the top of a fallen log, next to bright green fuzzy moss, were little velvety drops of red. After searching fruitlessly through a fungus field-guide to Ohio, an post-program online search by Meredith and Emily showed that it was a slime mold, which are cousins of single-celled organisms and closely resemble fungi, but are in the Protist kingdom of classification. To read more about Wolf’s Milk, click here.
Emily Foubert
