Eyes in the dark / Secret Garden/ County Farm Park / Live Redwood Burl/ Nature walk ....and much more

What has eyes, but cannot see?
The potato! The little bumps that grow on a potato's skin are called "eyes". An eye can grow into a new potato plant. A potato is a tuber. A tuber is a fat underground stem with little buds, that can grow into new plants.  Students are in a hurry to see them grow, dig out potatoes and make them into fries......hmmmmm, let us see what happens...

Do plants only grow from seeds?  We are experimenting to see whether they can grow from roots, seeds, leaves and stems.....

Thank you, Nick Giardino ( David's dad) for helping us make a raised bed. I asked my class what they would like to plant in our own little garden, they said, unanimously, a secret garden with pretty things in it, just like the Secret Garden! (We had read this book in the fall and they took me by surprise when they mentioned it. It is one of those books that stays with you, I guess.) So I asked, "What kind of pretty plants?" They said, something really beautiful to come back to, since school is almost over. I couldn't disagree. Each of my students asked to plant something entirely different.
We loaded our little wagon  and went to beautify our new found raised garden-bed and planted a rose bush, strawberry, pumpkin, tomato, sun-flower and coconut palm.

Students all came up with brilliant ideas as to what we could do with our plants in the fall.
1. Out of the pumpkin, make a jack o' lantern in the fall.
2. The children who come for summer camp could eat the strawberries.
3. The rose bush will keep on growing and they could enjoy looking at the roses.
4. Since the coconut palm is a tropical plant, it will not survive the winter so Amelia is going to re-pot it in the fall, take it home and care for it.
5. The sunflower seeds could be used to plant it next year or eat the seeds for snacks.

This morning we had a lovely surprise from a mom who had just come back from visiting The Muir Woods. The students were in awe to see the pictures of these gigantic trees. We are experimenting by growing ferns from a redwood burl. Thank you, Mrs. Godwin, for bringing us such a precious gift.

We went on a neighborhood nature walk looking for something exciting. The children were busy with their clip boards, trying to sketch an exotic plant that they spotted.

What an amazing month it has been exploring and learning so much about the greens in our lives; in and around our school and the Matthai Botanical Gardens!

Plants and growing things

This morning I read "Planting Wangari's Trees of Peace", by Jeanette Winter.  It is the story of Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and founder of the Green belt Movement.

After I was done reading, this is what my children said: "If we do not have trees, Earth will become one big desert." "We cannot go on cutting trees because we need nature to live." "Trees help us breathe better, trees provide food and animals live in trees." "We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon-dioxide, so we are helping each other."

"The Earth was naked. For me the mission was to try to cover it with green."- Wangari Maathai.

It was a glorious day in Spring, so we too were in a mission to explore the woods right on our back yard. I handed my students a clip board, paper, pencil and inch tape measure and off we went and transformed ourselves into Dendrologists.

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Since the Farming  theme in October, we have discussed living and growing things numerous times, and have done different experiments on seeds / plants, including math (multiplication with seeds, measuring the growth of a plant). Children nonetheless were excited to discover the woods in a totally new light. Maybe it was because of the clip boards and the new name that they had just learned - dendrologist. It was absolutely phenomenal to see our kids becoming silviculturists! They were jotting down, asking questions about the different species of plants that they saw and discovering the age of a tree by measuring and counting the rings. We looked at healthy plants and dead ones and observed that they were dead because of fungus growth in them. The children were exceptionally quiet and listening for sounds; they heard some birds singing and suddenly they spotted a toad and went wild!

I too am going wild, trying to cover so much about this beautiful theme of plants and growing things. What would we do without "the greens, the colors" in our lives I wonder...