Day 6: Buddy Reading and Seeds

We start each day working on our gardens--watering and adding a new plant to them.  On Wednesday we added Purple Heart plants.  After we add the new plant we also draw it in our plant encyclopedia section of journals and write its common and scientific name.  

 Here's a great prickly pear example from a few days ago.

 Yaxkin is taking a good long look at the plant before he starts his drawing.

 And Wednesday also brought our first time to buddy read!  We teamed up with the infant, toddler and preschool classes.  Each older student read a book to a younger friend.  This is something all of the children really enjoy--older and younger.  It's a great way for our older students to take pride (and practice!) in their reading skills while setting a good example of readers for our younger kids.

 We wrote thank-you letters to Ms. Sheila for giving us a tour of the garden.

 Then it was time to talk about seeds!  The children had brought an old adult sock from home.  We put them on over our shoes and went for a walk in the tall grass.

 On our way we happened upon an Indian Blanket flower growing wild!  That was our focus flower from the day's Wildflower fable, so it was perfect timing!  Then we sat down and looked at our socks to see what types of seeds we'd collected.  Unfortunately the previous days' rain on the grass (wet grass) reduced the amount of stuff stuck on the bottom of the socks.  We'll have to try again another day and see if we collect more!

 Drawing Indian Blanket in journals after listening to the fable.

 We use wildflower guides to locate the day's flower and read information about it.

 We have a high school artist who volunteers to come in each day after class and draw the next day's flower in chalk.  She is really talented and we are all enjoying her artwork!  She is also inspiring the children to be very detail-oriented in their own drawings--this promotes their scientific observation skills (as they look very closely and analyze both the flower photos in books and live specimens we bring in) and their art skills!

 Here is our little class library.  This year our reading club is required to be read-to by moms (aloud) for at least 20 minutes a night from an age-appropriate chapter book.  We used the booklists provided by Jim Trelease in The Read Aloud Handbook and have copies of his recommended books in Spanish and English.

 Books are grouped by age level (taking into consideration the fact that a parent will be reading the book aloud--not the student reading independently).

 And here is the little nook under the stairs where our gardens spend the night!

 Some more buddy-reading photos:

Ms. Rosa has more buddy reading photos on her phone of the infant class that I will get posted soon!  I am off to fill a tub with compost from my yard...we just MIGHT have a planting project to do with some seeds tomorrow!