Today, we were further introduced to what our STEMmersion, Into the Woods, was going to entail. We started the class off with a discussion of a quote by Henry Thoreau, which was “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” We discussed what we felt the meaning of living deliberately was to us and shared with the class. After that, we all read an excerpt from “Looking Around” by Anne Lamott and once again discussed with the class any thoughts we had about the reading. In order to get to know each other better, we all traced our hand onto a piece of paper and on each finger wrote one thing about our self. We went around with our paper and introduced ourselves to one another, having each person we introduced ourselves to sign our paper. After that activity, each of us received a syllabus and briefly went over it, so we all knew what to expect in order to prepare for this STEMmersion. One thing we needed to prepare was our blogs we are required to update daily, so we all set up our blogs and were able to customize them a bit. We then split into two and completed a team activity where we were given four small, wooden boards. With these boards, we had to get our entire team from one point to another, stepping only on the boards. An image of this activity is provided below.

 Soon after, a guest speaker, Scott Geisel, came to speak with us about nature writing. He explained to us what nature writing was and the importance of making our writing detailed enough for the reader to be able to visualize, in their own minds, what we were describing. He also talked of the major parts of nature writing, which were observation, meaning, and delivery. After he was done speaking, we had a recess break outside followed by lunch. Once lunch was over, we went into the gym along with our yoga mats, in preparation to do yoga. Unfortunately, something came up for our yoga instructor and she was unable to come teach us. Instead, we came up with some rules and expectations to follow during the course of Into the Woods. To end the day, we just simply went back to the classroom we began in and started to write our blog post for the day.