Today was our first day together. Pk-5th grade students (35!) and 6 highschool and middle school volunteers gathered to study our theme of: HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?
We start off each morning with some songs, a morning verse, and a couple of poems. I asked the kids today to tell me what a poem is, and one of the 5th grade boys answered, "It's something written with beautiful language." Yes, Indeed! And everyone's day should start off with some beautiful language!
Here we are singing:
We try to use as many hand movements as possible--this helps our little ones stay engaged, provides vocabulary cues for our bilingual students, and helps our brains make connections as we cross our midlines with our body parts (using both our right and left brains).
"Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Grow"
We add a copy of the song/poem lyrics to our journals. Each child keeps a journal throughout the session. We also follow along on large posters that students prepared for us before our session started.
Today we had a lot of work to do! We set up our gardens. First we had to paint and decorate our garden signs. Each child painted their name and added their own personal touch with art supplies. The big kids (2nd-5th grade) made their own first, and then they partnered with a "little guy" (pk-1st) and helped them with their work. We try to do a lot of intergenerational teamwork in our class.
We also had a pretest to take today! We recorded what the kids already know about plants, plant cycles, and parts of a plant...and we'll do it again at the end of our session to see how we've grown!
We made our gardens! Each child got a planter box to fill with compost. I love all these kiddos up in my truck bed loading their boxes with compost!
Now we needed to add our plants! I sent seeds, pots, and dirt home for homework for the kids about 2 weeks ago, so they returned today with sprouted plants for their planters. They have also been rooting some herbs for their gardens.
Look at all those beautiful gardens!
After our outside time we came inside for some literature exploration. First we had to get the oxygen flowing to our brains with some stretching and deep breathing.
See the bag in my hand? There's a REAL fox in there! Ask your child to tell you about it!
We read the fable of the Foxglove Plant today.
Then we drew a foxglove plant in our journals (we have a plant encyclopedia we'll be making in the back of our journals) and we wrote some information we learned about foxglove.
We have a guest artist that is doing a wildflower illustration in chalk for us every day--each day we'll be exploring a different Texas wildflower. Stay tuned!
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