Me in about 2018 at one of our summer camps
Welcome to my new blog! My name is Dacia Dauner and I am the director and owner of Apple Blossom Village. I wanted to begin documenting about our journey and how we teach at Apple Blossom Village with Yurts as classrooms. We are now in our second summer of having yurts as outdoor shelters and have already spent 2 school years with yurts as classrooms. As we move towards a new school year at the yurts, I will begin writing about a variety of topics including the care and maintenance of our yurts, how we manage things like cooking, water, and lights, how we combine Forest School philosophy and Waldorf-inspired curriculum to teach, nature arts ideas, recipes and snack ideas for outdoor school, and how nature teaches us everything! I just finished reading the book, There's no Such Thing as Bad Weather by Linda Åkeson McGurk, and wow this book says everything I believe in!
I had already read Balanced and Barefoot by Angela J. Hanscom and that book heavily influenced my ideas for outdoor school and summer camps. I began Apple Blossom Village in 2016 as I began to see the need for more outdoor play (and more free play in general) especially in the early childhood years. My own childhood was spent in the woods and gardens in northern Minnesota and I wanted a childhood like that for my own kids and all kids. We began small in the building at Rail River Folk School and used the yurt in the outdoor space that was generously shared with us by the Indigenous Environmental Network. We had a Kindergarten group of 9 kids and a small group of homeschooled 1st - 5th graders that met 2 - 3 days per week. The IEN Yurt became central to our days as we stayed outside longer and longer into the fall in those first few years. One year we managed to stay outside until the first snow fall on October 31st. And in 2021 as we were still in the COVID years, we stayed outside until the first week in December in a 4 season tent! Then we would move the classroom into the building space for the winter, still coming outside to play everyday unless temperatures were too dangerous.
Those early years taught us that if we had yurts of our own and dedicated space outdoors, we could easily just keep our classrooms outdoors and not have to move into the building. Yurts or Gers are built by the people of Mongolia who live in a harsh climate where it gets very cold and windy. The round shape of the yurt is meant to withstand high winds. After researching, we decided on the Groovy Yurts Company whose yurts are built by Mongolian families and shipped to Canada for inspection and distribution. Now 2 years later, we have been cozy through 2 winters, and look forward to another school year coming soon!