Teaching is a process. My son is learning how to skate, and it’s challenging for me as his teacher. I have no memory of learning how to skate as I learned at age 3, the same age he’s at now. For me to teach him, I can’t rely on personal experience because I’ve known how to skate for as long as I can remember. So what do to? First, I’m getting him out on the ice and teaching him to be comfortable there. Then we start working on the nuts and bolts of how to skate; balancing, pushing off and gliding. And the added challenge is that if he wants to go skating and is excited about it, it will be easier for him to learn. So I have to make it fun.

There are a lot of similarities for me between teaching my son to skate and teaching bushcraft in our programs. The main one is that I have to be aware of where he’s at all the time and adjust as necessary. Because I’m not teaching skating, I’m teaching a little boy to skate. There’s a huge difference between the two.

It’s the second day of the heat wave, and a bunch of snow has melted. It’s supposed to stay pretty warm until the weekend, when we return to more regular weather. When it does get cold the remaining snow will freeze solid, and the lakes will be great for skating as there’s water pooled on the surface of the ice now. The skiing… not so good. Yesterday the snow in the field was still crotch-deep, but it may have melted some overnight. Listening to the rain on the roof right now, my guess is that by the end of the day it might just reach my knees.