Kids Tent 2023

For Ages 5 and Up
It may be that the kids at the Faire have more fun even than the rest of us. The Great Lakes Herb Faire provides an inspiring learning environment for our next generation of herbalists. Many of the kids have been coming since the beginning and we are blessed to watch them grow. Others come for the first time and find the atmosphere welcoming with a weekend full of activities of herbal lore and knowledge.
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Space is limited!  ​Register early as the kids tent fills up fast.

Kids Tent Class Descriptions

Beauty Everywhere – Stories for a Nature-Connected Community
with Rowena Conahan Friday night by the Amphitheater- open to kids and adults
 “Beauty Everywhere” is the title of a book of nature-connected stories and activities I’ve written that might be ready for distribution in September. I will be telling original stories from my book. Stories will likely be told at the amphitheater with the fire. 

Build a "Twigloo"
with Deanne Bednar
Come create a "stick tipi structure" with wood and rope!  To make a "twigloo": ...lean sticks together, tie them up, decorate with natural materials, climb in them and Enjoy! We hope to gather sticks & nature things from the woods.  We can enjoy seeing & hanging out in the Twigloos during the Faire!  

Fight, Flight or Freeze: Vagus Nerve Reset –Techniques and Herbs to Help You Recenter and Calm
with Stacey Quade
Your Vagus nerve is one of the largest and most important nerves in your body.  It connects to many other organ systems in your body. This nerve is a key player in helping us stay calm and centered and happy. Learn about how to keep it functioning in balance with techniques to re-set yourself when you feel stressed, anxious, or depressed. And, explore herbs that help our nervous system.
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Herbal Art! Paint with Mother Nature's Palette
with Joan Jach
This will be a fun, hands-on class for kids! We will learn about the way our ancestors made paints and pigments, then make some of our own using found and prepared ingredients. Students will paint their very own Herbal Art piece to remember their time at the Faire. I plan to have some sourced ingredients for making paints in addition to taking students on a short walk to gather (non-poisonous!) plants/berries/nuts for making pigments. My goal for this class is to introduce students to the ancient process of making art (specifically painting) using raw materials from Nature. Other art supplies like pencils, crayons, ink and pigment from rocks will also be discussed/demonstrated. Safety and ethics of wildcrafting will be explicitly discussed during this class.

Honor Mother Nature with Drum and Chant
with Janice Prelesnik
Participants will learn simple earth-based chants and simple drum rhythms to accompany the chants. Drums will be provided, but bring your own if you have one. Come to drum! Come to chant! Come to drum and chant! Or come and listen! No musical experience is necessary.

 “Oh Boy, Does That Taste Great!"
with Leslie Alexander
We’ll explore five flavors, why flavor is important, discuss the differences we experience and what we each prefer. We’ll choose a group favorite. Yes, lots to taste!

Magic, Mindful, Breathing - Wand Making
with Breezy Barcelo 
In this class, we will learn about mindfulness and conscious breathing together. We will practice mindful awareness of our bodies and our breaths and learn how it can help us when we are nervous or upset, or when we need to get some rest!
We are going to make mindful breathing wands out of pipe cleaners and beads and take our wands with us, so we can use the beads to help remind us to stop and breathe!

Tree & Flower Power Potions
with Ashley Meek
Join us on a hike to identify flowers, trees, and plants and get to know some of their medicinal uses and energetic vibrational powers! We will touch on ethical foraging and the honorable harvest. We will then make plant power potions (essences) to help us support our confidence, calm, love, strength etc. with the help of the amazing plants all around us!
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Tai Chi for Kids
with Joseph Quade
Come and have fun learning moves like Grasp Bird’s Tail Right and Left, Ward Off, White Crane Spreads Wings , Play Guitar, and more from the first section of the Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan. Find out why Tai Chi is good for you and why people have been practicing this art form of movement for hundreds of years.

Tween/Teen Class Descriptions


Backyard Buddies for Your Boo Boos: Basic Herbal First Aid
with Lora Krall
Drawing on my years in emergency nursing, this class isdesigned to instruct you on how to use common plants from your yard as well as common kitchen spices to support such injuries as cuts, abrasions, insect bites, nose bleeds, and many others. We will discuss various applications, the best supplies to always have focusing on multiple uses for single plants. This will include demonstration and hands-on practice.

BANG, SNIFF, GRAB - The Story of your Senses at Night
with Chad & Lexi O'Kulich
Get ready to enjoy the mysteries of the darkness when sensory awareness is heightened and storytelling can be most impactful. Many folks fear the darkness due to an insecurity in their own abilities to sense what is happening without vision. This evening's activity will prove them wrong. We will encourage students to step out of their comfort zone, connect to their awareness of the other four senses and explore the beauty of the nighttime. Depending upon the weather, there are 5 different potential senses activities that would be performed this evening engaging the uses of sound, touch, or smell. We will provide a safe environment where limiting the students vision, they will be asked to ‘find their way’ to the ‘end’ either via listening, smelling, or touching.

Herbal Apprentice Workshop
with Janice Prelesnik
We will create heart healing remedies to send to friends in underserved communities. Think rose for the heart, milky oats for the nerves, nettles for nourishment among others. Roll up your sleeves and we will craft tea blends, elixirs, and more herbal love.

Plant Fibers: Making Cordage
with Greg Monzel
Hominids have been twisting plant fibers into twine by hand for at least 50,000 years. Playing with plant fibers is a great winter craft to connect with stems and ancestors while producing beautiful and strong twine for tying herb bundles, tourniquets, lashing shelters, etc. Together we break down stems and tease out the fibers, then learn the reverse-wrap two-ply cordage technique.

Sacred Order of Survival - Track Identification & Tracking Animals
with Chad O'Kulich
This intensive will focus on the last fundamental in the Sacred Order of Survival: Food. Using Native American philosophies, non-traditional methods and the materials that nature provides, students are challenged to learn necessary outdoor & primitive skills, accomplish collective tasks, & meet the physical demands made on them by Mother Earth.

Wild Earth Sculpture
with Deanne Bednar
Feel Free to explore sculpting with earth (a clay/sand subsoil mix) and integrating natural things like pods and found nature items ...we can forage from the woods! Make an animal, a free form, a model hobbit hut....or something of your choice!

Kid's Tent Teachers

My name’s Leslie Alexander and I’m interested in practicalities. I enjoy bending ideas and shaping protocols to make them accessible and interesting. I think that this is most apparent in my clinical work, the mentoring I do and the Round Tables we teach. I work holistically, with an interest in many aspects of the mouth. In my clinical practice, I enjoy working with others to sustain well-being, to address chronic conditions and acute health related challenges. I’m very interested in maritime medicinals and I enjoy making cyanotypes (sun prints) as well as weaving. I like food, kitchen medicine, talk, laughter and oh, I’ve a very cute dog!
https://leslie-alexander.net/
Breezy Barcelo is an occupational therapist (OT) and part-time instructor in the Holistic Health program at Western Michigan University. She works for a nonprofit scholarship foundation, supporting non-traditional college students on their journey. While pursuing her own degrees, she focused her research on forest therapy and the healing power of nature's medicine. She is a kitchen witch, mother of 7, unschooling advocate, and has walked with hundreds of families through the childbearing and postpartum years as a doula. Breezy now lives in Kalamazoo and offers Nature OT each summer at a forest school in Grand Rapids.
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Deanne Bednar says, "I have been sharing natural building skills since taking my first course with the Cob Cottage Company in 1996 (after retiring from Middle School Art & Sustainable Future teaching) and since then have overseen many intern & volunteers on various projects. From 2003 to the present, have coordinated and taught at the Strawbale Studio, was part of the teaching team for the Natural Cottage Project which provides 2 week start-to-finish building workshops and have been a co-teacher for 10 day workshops with the Cob Cottage Company. I have also made many presentations at Bioneers Detroit, Earth Day Events, Re-skilling Conferences, Colleges and other educational venues. Illustrator of several books on natural building: The Hand-Sculpted House, The Natural Plaster Book and the Cobber’s Companion. I LOVE to forage for materials!!"
Joan Jach. As a child, I was always outside: building forts, picking flowers, watching animals and communing with Mother Nature. I try to reclaim that feeling of complete wonder in my art and my products. My work runs a broad line between the cultivated and the wild, the well-planned success and the successful fail, the grit of real life and the magic of make believe. Whatever you find in my work, I hope it makes you feel more connected to Nature and full of Wonder! Joan Jach owns and runs Old Town Flowers, a small, urban farm/studio in Champaign. She teaches the art and craft of living a beautiful life at Common Ground Co-op, Hopscotch Bakery and HER Creative Collective. Find out more: www.joanjach.studio.
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Lora Krall  As both a registered nurse and an herbalist, Lora combines her skills in both discipline’s as an educatorfor plants and people. Lora has been a contributor to Herbal Living Magazine blog, has been published in the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy blog as well as the Journal of Medicinal Plant Conservation. She has spoken at the Midwest Women’s Herb Conference, United Plant Savers regional conference, American Herbalist Guild Symposium and Sage Mountain Retreat Center in Vermont. For the past 2 years, she has been a guest educator for the online course, Building an End of Life Herbal Tool Kit with herbalists Emily Ruff and Marie Frohlich. Lora presently works as a teaching assistant and manages the student forum for the Science and Art of Herbalism Course created by Rosemary Gladstar. She is working on her first book using herbs as a support for the grieving process.
​Coyote and Lexer from Texer have been guiding Wilderness Expedition trips for a combined total of over 30 years. They both enjoy enhancing their awareness in Mother Nature and sharing their experiences with all those willing to learn. Growth occurs when you step out of your comfort zone and both Coyote and Lexer are always teaching and learning from students of all ages. Coyote is also a Spanish teacher, Varsity Soccer coach, Director of the Horizons-Upward Bound Wilderness program and leadership coordinator at Cranbrook Schools, and Lexer is a Repair Manager for Patagonia and a lead guide for the Horizons-Upward Bound Wilderness program. Miigwetch!
Greg Monzel is a student of nature with a gift for nourishing deep connections between people and plants. He first experienced the medicinal power of plants as a teenager when he successfully treated his chronic strep-throat with raw pineapple. He has been a practicing herbal educator, medicine maker and grower since 2008. He and his wife Colleen Donahoe co- founded Persimmon Herb School in 2015 to hold plant centered space and build a healing community in central Indiana.  www.persimmonherbschool.com
Ashley Meek is a Forest School Guide, Naturopathic Doctor, Massage and Craniosacral Therapist, Birth Doula and Reiki Practitioner at Mother Nurture Holistic Wellness LLC and Strong Roots Forest School near Grand Rapids, MI. She is passionate about living a life where we nurture our connections to the land and each other, listening to the wisdom of the Earth, living in partnership with nature and in loving community. She practices bodywork and energy therapies as well as naturopathy on a converted school bus on her land located on the Flat River. She also leads forest school classes, foraging and nature art camps, herbal medicine classes for adults and children, sacred circles and ceremonies, and handcrafts nature inspired art and jewelry and apothecary remedies.
Janice Marsh-Prelesnik ​is excited to once again lead classes for our amazing kids and teens! As a mother of four, grandmother of four, and home birth midwife (now retired) to hundreds of babies and their families, Janice has spent a lifetime cherishing the next generation. She teaches a year-long herbalism course to K-12 students at the Gull Lake Virtual Partnership, which is a combination of online and in person herbal learning. Janice also leads earth based song circles and practices music as medicine in which she offers music and herb events for people in hospice and memory care.
Joseph Quade of Great Lakes Therapies is a Physical Therapist specializing in manual and movement therapies for chronic and acute pain, injury prevention and rehabilitation, and overall physical/mental/emotional healing. As a Physical Therapist since 1997, I have studied a variety of modalities for manual and musculoskeletal rehabilitation.
I provide an integrative approach, tailored to fit your needs to get you empowered, moving, and connected to your body. I can also personalize an exercise program, or just help you to incorporate exercise principles into your daily life.

Focus points of my training include: Myofascial Release, Core Stabilization, Cranial Sacral Therapy (Level 1), Strength and Conditioning, Mechanical Link, Tai Chi, Healing Touch, and Herbalism. I have been practicing Tai Chi since 2006, as a form of integrative self-care for flexibility, functional strength, and balance.
Stacey Quade is a Certified Healing Touch Practitioner and Instructor (CHTP/I), Herbalist, and Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant (COTA) living and practicing in Duluth, MN. Her business name is Energy for Life Connection.
Stacey Quade, COTA, CHTP/I, Herbalist, has maintained a private practice in Healing Touch-energy based therapy and Herbal Medicine since 2002 in Duluth, MN. She is Certified to teach the first two levels of course curriculum through Healing Beyond Borders. Stacey recently retired from 33 years of Occupational therapy at Essentia Health (1988 to 2022). Those years have helped her to hone her skills in the practical application of whole health.

Stacey’s herbal experience stems from a lifelong relationship with plants and nature. Structured learning and clinical education began in 2002. Stacey's primary mentor is Margi Flint. She has studied under Matthew Wood and with Jim MacDonald and Nicholas Schnell.

Her herbal products are available through direct sales and in community at the Duluth Whole Foods Co-op and other local businesses.

Stacey teaches classes on a variety of wellness topics, including energetic principles, diet/nutrition and lifestyle basics and herbalism in the Duluth MN. area and surrounding communities.