Spring fun

Another great idea from Play Based Learning. The children can also make their own garden supports with the plastic pipes and connectors.

Native Plants for balance

Carol has a great philosophy.

I like her videos.

We did get back in the garden last week, ridding it of practically all those pesky weeds. The peas, lettuce and radishes have suddenly grown with all this rain. As soon as it dries a bit we'll be back to digging compost holes and planting more seeds. The children feel really good seeing the result of their work. They are careful with the baby plants, taking care to point out what is growing to children from the other class. They treat every pill bug, worm and centipede with care. Last week one boy cautioned his classmates to be gentile with the bugs by stressing several times, "They are defenseless!"

The radishes are growing. . .

and so are the weeds. We're not certain if the lettuce seeds have sprouted or if we just have a zillion new little weeds. We'll wait and see. E.W. is holding one of the garden's residents. The children were happy to get back out in the garden after so many days of rain and wetness. We used the rainy days to plant pea seeds in a glass inside our classroom. They have already sprouted, letting us see the root growing downward and the stem growing upward. Yesterday, they grew another inch. The first leaf was unfolding today. We also have a radish, a carrot and an onion planted inside glass tubes, hoping to see how they will develop under the ground.

Between the garden and the fence is a small area where the children can use shovels to dig holes. We try to respect the worms that we encounter, realizing that they are living creatures and that they help us in the garden. We already used 2 of the holes to hold the compost the class has been collecting from their lunch and snack scraps (fruits, vegetables and egg shells only).

Now it's a garden.

We planted radish and lettuce seeds last week. Then we watered, then hoped for rain and on Friday, it did! Just to see how dense the weeds population was, here's another picture of the weeding process. Without 16 weeders this would have been a much more tedious job.

After raking away the old mulch, each child placed a brick or two to form a path. Here are some of the boys finishing the path by filling it with the old mulch.

We have a bin with 1 Sharpie pen, lots of plastic markers and the seeds. I showed them the seed packets. We saw the long thin lettuce seeds and the little round radish seeds. We read that the lettuce had to be planted 1/4 inch deep and the radishes at a 1/2 inch depth. I wrote "lettuce" on a popsicle stick and made a line 1/4 inch from the end. I did the same for the radish seeds, but with a 1/4 inch mark on it. I put the seeds in little containers to keep them from spilling out. Each child dug a little hole with our tiny cultivator, checked its depth with the popsicle gauge, planted 2 seeds in the hole (just in case) and wrote what was planted on the plastic marker. Each planted 2 lettuce and 2 radish seeds. Now we have a garden full of plastic markers.

Happy Earth Day

Finally the weather cooperated and allowed us to begin cultivating the playground garden. We divided the class into two groups; the "dragonflies" and the "caterpillars". The garden isn't big enough for more than 8 children to be digging, raking and planting at the same time. But it's just the right size for the two groups to plant and care for. Today both groups learned how to dig out each weed with its root. And even though they each worked hard, we still have more weeds to pull tomorrow!