I made up new words to that song, too, changing I wrote a letter to my love to I found some leaves with my friends. I mean, really, what preschooler needed to be singing about writing love letters and losing them? They had their whole rest of their lives to worry about that stuff. While we sang, the kids collected autumn leaves and pinecones and dried wildflowers and seed pods and anything else that looked interesting and would fit in their baskets.

The kids found seats at the picnic tables on the edge of the playground. Polly and I handed out big sheets of paper and tiny paper cups filled with paste and a popsicle stick for smearing it. The kids pasted away to their hearts’ content, creating found object collages that at least one parent would be sure to complain made a mess of her fancy SUV on the drive home.

I didn’t care.

The students weighted their masterpieces down with small rocks so they wouldn’t blow away while they dried. We all sat in a circle on a nearby patch of grass for one more activity, taking advantage of this scrumptious weather, because before we knew it, it would be gone until spring.

I took out a bag of pinecones and passed them around. Making pinecone birdfeeders was one of my favorite activities to do with my students. We used to make them with peanut butter, back before Bayberry had become peanut-free due to the explosion of nut allergies. Now we used suet. Suet is animal fat, which you can buy from the butcher. Or you can cheat like I do and buy it from the bird-food aisle in the big box store.

Polly cut foot-long pieces of twine while I gave them out, then we helped the kids tie their twine to one end of the pinecone, two to three rows below the wider end of the cone and tucked in behind the scales so they didn’t slip off. Then we tied a loop on the other end so their birdfeeders would be able to hang from a tree or even a plant hook.

We shared spatulas and little tubs of suet, and the kids smeared their pinecones with the suet. Only one student, Liam, tasted the suet this time around, which was a major improvement over last year. Polly redirected the spatula so quickly that it was almost as if it hadn’t happened.

I thought for a moment, decided I really didn’t feel like writing the incident report: While making birdfeeders in school today, Liam inadvertently sampled the animal fat. It was not to his liking, so very little was consumed, but please do keep an eye out for potential symptoms. I mean, half the Bayberry families were on low carb diets anyway, and suet and bone broth were practically the same thing. Right?