Watering our planters--students brought empty milk jugs which we re-purposed into watering cans. Our awesome volunteers poked holes in the caps and *presto,* perfect watering can!
Wildflowers for the tables each day:
This is my "garden truck," filled with planter boxes, mulch for the boxes, watering cans, and a new pot of plants for the students to add to their gardens each day.
A highschool artist volunteers each afternoon to draw the next day's focus plant. We're reading
Bloomin' Tales: Legends of Seven Favorite Texas Wildflowers. Each day we have a focus flower and a legend that goes along with the name of the plant. Our artist draws each plant in chalk for us.
Today we added prickly pear to the gardens. We had some tongs since the prickly pear have spines on them. Many of our friends just couldn't keep themselves from touching the plants and got some "cactus fingers." Of course that is okay, part of having a garden is learning through our sense of touch!
So far our gardens have Chicks And Hens, prickly pear, and an assortment of herbs (which students rooted before the session began) and seedlings (grown as homework before class began). We add another plant each day.
prickly pear plants....and tongs! Great fine motor practice, by the way, using tongs....
Two of our friends pulled up plants on the playground on their own and brought them over to show the teachers--they had roots and everything! They took a few minutes to share their discoveries with the large group. Love scientists that explore under their own motivation!
We have a "Plant Encyclopedia" in our journals. Each day we draw our focus flower under its corresponding letter, then we write its common name and scientific name. For our PK and K students, this is a challenging amount of writing and they work hard at it! Our older students add some facts and information they learned about the plant during our story and a corresponding nonfiction article we read about each plant.
Our highschool volunteers are awesome! They do a great job individualizing instruction with our students--here Vlada is working with two PK students, helping them to draw their prickly pear plants. She is already a great teacher--she was prompting them with her words--what could you add next? What colors are in the cactus? How big are the spines?
And here's Jose doing much the same thing--helping a younger student use a diagram of the plant to draw his own in the journal.
And a independent 5th grader working on getting her details and shading JUST RIGHT!
Here's Yami using her finger to draw a letter in the air and help prompt a little guy on the correct letter formation.
He watched, and then was able to do it on his own!
See, I told you our volunteers are the best!!
Our journal covers were U-G-L-Y so of course we had to spruce them up!
Everyone got a chance to personalize their plant journal.
Friday we had a guest chef come and teach us lots of scientific information about the prickly pear--how it adapts to its environment, how it's used by both ranchers and chemists, its nutritional value, and the, of course, she cooked some for us!
She cut and prepared the prickly pear (which we have learned is actually the stem of the plant) and talked about the features of the plant.
Everyone got to try some!
And there were lots of "takers" when she passed out seconds!
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