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...