This fall in First Grade, we have made many observations about what is changing outside. We also did a fun experiment with pine cones! Here's what the First Graders have to say about Outdoor Learning for October and November!

First the leaves on one tree fell. Then the leaves on another tree fell.

Today, I noticed the pine cones were hanging down lower on the trees outside.

When we did the experiment with STEM, I remember we had to get 2 pine cones and we put water in a cup. We put one pine cone in the cup of water.

I liked the part that we did with pine cones. We started to go outside and we got all of the pine cones. We put them in the water to let the spikes close. The spikes opened when the pine cone dried.

We put pine cones in water and it took the spikes off.

The pine cones turned little in the water.

The sides of the pine cones went down.

The pine cones grow on the trees outside.

I noticed a lot of times when we went outside it was cold.

When we had the pine cone experiment we found pine cones near the sidewalks.

We compared the dry and wet pine cones by drawing a picture of them on paper.

When we were doing the pine cone experiment, I noticed that they were on the pine straw.

When we were finding the pine cones, some were on the trees and some had fallen down.

There were so many pine cones outside.

When we put the pine cones in the water, the spikes closed. I think when we dumped out the water, the spikes opened back up.

When we put the pine cones in the water they got darker.

We had to find the biggest pine cone we could find.

The pine cones did not close immediately, but over time they slowly closed. The don't want to get soaking wet in the inside. If they get soaking wet, they may not produce more seeds.

When the pine cones closed they got more prickly.

We have to put on our jackets because it is so cold outside.

I noticed a lot of pine cones that fell.

In the winter, in this month, it's been raining a lot. It's rained 3 times in a row already!

There is pine straw, small pine cones, and big pine cones outside.

The grass was wet, and it didn't dry quickly because it was rainy and. There is more shade on the playground and it is cold, because it's almost winter.

I noticed that a lot of leaves fell, because fall is here.

4th Graders love outdoor learning!

Last week, 4th graders took advantage of a couple unusually warm late November days by heading outside for independent reading time! Nothing better than fresh air and a book!

Primary October and November

In October, the Primary classes completed a PBL unit on farms.  We turned our classrooms into farms and we went on a field trip to a pumpkin patch.  We were able to see pumpkins growing on the vine and we even got to pick our own pumpkin.  We also saw cotton and corn growing.  It was really fun!

In November, we wrote like scientists in writing.  We went on a nature walk throughout our campus and collected items to examine in class.  We learned how scientists look at things closely and write in detail about what they see.  We created books about things in nature.

Shadow Fun!

Third graders went outside to learn about their shadows.  They discovered that the position of the sun will affect the placement of their shadow.  Students traced their shadows at different times of the day and observed the changes.  Of course, any opportunity to be outside, learn, and play with chalk is always fun for third graders!  

Salsa Success!

Primary concluded the year with some successful salsa ingredients!

As shown below, we will soon have tomatoes and bell peppers galore. 

After months of patience and hard work, Ms. Carter's class grew tomato and pepper plants that will be ready for harvesting this summer. As explained in the End Of Year presentation, the adequate watering and direct sunlight in her room provided these plants with an ideal environment. 

Other primary classes were also successful growing in their classrooms and in the Primary flowerbed. While chives and cilantro were not as successful as the main salsa ingredients, the Primary students learned all about how to grow successful (and unsuccessful) plants through our Project Based Learning. 

Bell Peppers (above)

Tomatoes (above)

Let the fiesta begin!

End of the Year 5th grade

Our garden club celebrated the end of the year with a small morning feast.  Everything we ate came from the earth.  Black bean salsa with corn, tomato, pepper, onion, chiles, avocado, and seasoned with lime juice, olive oil, cumin, and cilantro.  We had veggie pizza seasoned with basil from our herb garden and a salad with romaine and green leaf lettuce.  This lettuce and basil began in our aquaponics towers and was then transplanted outside when the weather was nice.  We found that it grew quickly with the rain we had.

Cucumbers from our garden were served at the 5th grade end of year pizza party. (We needed something healthy to go with the chips and soda!)  Our tomato plants will be ready to harvest from soon.  Students continued to pick a mint sprig, chive or sage if they like spicy, as they went out to recess.  The honeysuckle on the playground was also enjoyed by all during the month of May.  We love seeing our children excited about the wonders that come from the earth.  Each year we teach that you can eat some things right out of the ground without fear.  All of our things are grown organically, mulched with newspaper to reduce weeds and pests.

As a final project, each 5th grade class built a bat box, each with the capacity to hold a large colony of bats.  This was our idea to help with mosquito control in an environmentally conscious way.  Students in math class looked at plans and figured out how much wood we had to buy.  We measured and cut lumber then put it together with a power drill.  They loved this part!  Some students were involved with staining the boxes to protect them from weather.  We will work on hanging these next school year.  Bats usually look for these in early spring. 

It has been a great year working with aquaponics, gardening inside, and garden club, gardening outside.  We see the value of organically grown food and the myriad ways food can be prepared in delicious ways using herbs and spices.  We have laughed over honeysuckle nectar and herbs to clean the palate or refresh our senses.  And finally, we enjoyed building something to help our animal neighbors that help us in return.

Happy Summer!

Horray for Painted Lady Butterflies! End of the Year-Second Grade

End of the Year-Second Grade
We enjoyed caring for our caterpillars this quarter. We watched them as they turned into a chrysalis. We were excited to see them transform into beautiful butterflies! Our painted lady butterflies even laid beautiful, tiny, blue eggs. The life cycle began again. We compared animal life cycles to plant life cycles as our culminating project. We enjoyed sharing our life cycle books with parents during our end of the year breakfast. It was a fun filled day. This year has been terrific. Our students have a great understanding of what plants need to grow, can compare and contrast different growing methods (i.e. hydroponics), and describe the interdependence between animal life cycles and plant life cycles. It is our hope that their knowledge will continue to deepen in the years to come.

Well, the polls show that third graders LOVED our plant growth and development unit.  They were so engaged in watching our broccoli grow and smelling it along the way.  We can't wait to experience it all over again with our new third graders next year!  Have a wonderful summer everyone.

Check out our 4th grade BLUEBIRD houses!

Please click on the link below to view the 4th grade bluebird presentation:)


Bluebird Houses!

Our garden is very pretty.

Our garden is big from learning all this year.

Our garden grew and grew.

Our garden is like a dream garden.

Mrs. Sheeler's class planted the flowers.

There are lots of vegetables growing.

There is some weeding that needs to be done. 

Our garden has a lot of flowers. 

We added the flowers so we would attract butterflies.

Our garden has a lot of green in it. 

I noticed that the garden is growing bigger than I thought it would. 

The garden is growing really fast.

We have a lot of flowers in our garden. 

Our garden is big.

Our garden is different. 

Our garden is really big. 

Our garden is getting really really big.

We learned a lot of things from our garden. 

Our garden needs water and sun. 

We put earthworms in our garden. 

The earthworms help the garden grow.

We have planted onions and they grew. I noticed there is a tiny flower on one of the leaves.

We planted scallions and potatoes. 

We are going to make friendship stew out of all the vegetables. 

Our garden has changed a lot since we first planted it. 

The onions were a little bit "floopy" (droopy).

We planted a lot of things in our garden. 

Our garden has many different kinds of flowers. 

Our garden has a chrysanthemum.

Our garden has bright colors.

Our garden has many different vegetables. 

Our garden has a lot of different colors of flowers. 

There's grass around our garden. 

Our garden is important for us.

There's different types of flowers in our garden.

Our garden makes us happy!

We are so very proud of our garden!

Excited for presentation!

The third grade students are excited to share their findings at the end of the year. We have been observing our lettuce plants and have been planning our presentation!

Growing... Growing...

Primary's plants are growing quickly...and almost ready for our end-of-year salsa party!

Pepper Plants (above)

Tomato Plants (above)

April has been a busy month for outdoor learning in fifth grade and gardening with 4th and 5th graders.  When I last blogged, our garden club members had started seeds indoors and had wonderful seedlings, but we had to wait to plant outdoors because of the frost predicted in early April.  Last Friday, the 22nd, we finally transplanted to our gardens.  Our flower bed has zinnia and cosmos, our herb bed has chives, cilantro, basil, and mint, and our veggie beds have heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce.  We hope to get mature cucumbers by the end of the year, but the tomatoes will probably ripen later in June.  We will continue to weed and water the plants.  Luckily we had a rainstorm Friday afternoon to give them a good dose of natural rainwater.  There are some perennial grasses that are tougher than weeds to get rid of, but at recess and on gardening days, we pluck some.
The mint is coming in nicely.  We have chocolate mint in the herb box and peppermint in a pot by the fence.  I also have a spearmint plant in my room that students nibble on from time to time.

5th graders went on a walk around campus last week while the weather was nice to observe signs of spring and encourage writing.  Students found out that chive flowers are stronger and spicier than the stem.  We were disappointed that there is no honeysuckle yet. We noticed new plant and animal life, dandelions for blowing ,birds singing and the warm breeze on our faces.  We spread blankets on the ground to just listen, then read poetry.  When I read the lyrics to "Blowing in the Wind" as a poem, the wind started to blow so it felt a little magical.  We also read Robert Frost, who they are familiar with, and various other poems.  It is really hard to get this squirmy bunch to sit and just be, but it was an enjoyable attempt.

Babies!

Today was an exciting day at KES! Our eggs have hatched and we now have babies in one of the houses! They are tiny! The mother bird is extremely protective of her babies, and has been somewhat aggressive! Now we will wait and watch to see when they hatchlings fledge the nest!

Baby chickadees have arrived!

More exciting news: our bluebird nest now contains 5 beautiful eggs! We know that bluebirds will lay 1 egg a day, and we noticed the first egg on Wednesday. On Friday there were 3 eggs, and this afternoon there were 5.  So, we'll know if she's finished laying eggs if there are still 5 eggs tomorrow when we check. Then it should be about 2 weeks before they hatch! Who knew bird watching could be so fun!

Wednesday, April 13th 

Friday, April 15th 

Monday, April 18th

Friendship Garden Progress

Our Poem for this week...

April Garden Fun

April is here, the cold is gone
The sun just peeked through the clouds
All around us spring has bloomed
Of our garden we are so proud

The April rains have saved out soil
The earthworms helped out too
The dived through the garden and made
Tunnels under all the roots

We missed our garden while we were gone
For Spring Break when school was closed
We hoped and wished it would be OK
I think the plants started to grow!

What have we seen????

At first the plants were little, but the next time they grew a little bit bigger.

I saw the potato plant grow bigger.

The celery stalk is starting to grow.

Our garden is getting better and better, because of our earthworms. 

The earthworms are making tunnels so the roots can get the water they need.

The plants have been growing a lot, because of the rains and the earthworms.

The plants have sprouted some more.

Our onion plant grew some leaves.

We grew an onion in water. It grew leaves and roots. It got so big and so stinky that we had to move it to the garden!

The plants started to grow roots. 

The earthworms helped our plants by eating the dead plants and made new nutrients.

The rain and sun are helping our garden grow. 

One of the onions is so big that it's growing over the edge of the garden!

The plants are growing really really big... maybe we should start picking the vegetables.

Our garden is so big with all the plants inside... the soil, sun, and rain has been helping it grow. 

Our plants are so big that we are running out of space in our garden!

All the plants look a little different and a little the same. 

We have needed to prune the potato plants.

Our garden is growing bigger and bigger and bigger. 

We've had to learn to be patient and give the vegetables time to grow... they're not ready yet! 

We have BLUEBIRDS!

We have our first bluebird egg! Stay tuned! 

Baby birds arriving soon at KES!

4th grade is thrilled to announce...we're expecting baby birds! We've been closely monitoring our bluebird houses, and although these are not bluebird eggs, we are excited to finally have a nest at all! There are six red speckled eggs in one of the houses. We can tell by the appearance of the nest, (messy, and made from hair, moss and feathers, instead of strictly pine straw), that this is another type of bird. After researching further, Ms. Webster's class believes that these are chickadee eggs! We will know soon, as we expect them to hatch sometime this week. Chickadees usually hatch within 12-13 days. We'll post again soon when our hatchlings have arrived!

Planting Our Garden From Kitchen Scraps

What did we plant in our garden?

·      Onions

·      Scallions

·      Celery

·      Potatoes

How did we start our garden from kitchen scraps?

·      We put our plants in containers of water.

·      They started to sprout.

·      We planted them in pots.

·      Then, we put them into the outdoor garden.

How do earth worms help our garden grow?

·      Earth worms eat dead plants.

·      They dig holes so that rain and sunlight can get into the garden.

·      The earth worms dig holes for air to help the plants grow.

·      They move around the nutrients in the soil.

·      They mix up the soil.

·      They help break up leaves into the soil.

  

What have we noticed about our garden so far?

·      The plants are starting to grow.

·      The plants have grown roots.

·      The earth worms have made holes in the garden.

·      The garden has nutrients in the soil. 

·      The onion has grown a lot.

·      They have grown taller.

·      The celery is growing stalks. 

Ready for Planting!

The third grade classes are ready for Spring weather to come! We are excited to see progress for our plants :)

The Garden Club has begun to clean out the gardens around the school.  We have weeded 3 boxes so far.  While weeding we play with the worms and smell the soil.  Farmers smell their soil as well.  When it smells sweet, the fungus in the soil is the way it should be.  When the soil smells sour, it might not be good planting soil.  There were a lot of weeds coming up with the unseasonably warm weather.  We placed the weeds in our compost bin and turned the bin, putting the rich soil at the bottom into our herb garden.

We planted seed in the classroom so that they will be ready to transplant after spring break.  Germination has been very successful and we are watering the seedlings with water from a rain barrel.  No chemicals on our plants!

We have cucumber, heirloom tomato, squash, parsley, basil, and cilantro to eat, and zinnia, cosmos, and morning glory for beautification. We hope to get the morning glory covering the fence down to the playground. I also have a new spearmint plant in the room that we will sample in coming weeks.

The chives and mint  perennials are making a strong comeback in our outdoor gardens.  Now if  the weather will stay warm, we will be on our way to another beautiful spring in the gardens.

Grow Your Plants...And Eat Them Too!

Primary has planted the salsa ingredients! 

Our peppers, chives, cilantro, and tomatoes are all on their way to becoming a tasty, end-of-year snack. 

First grade also had a similar idea and planted other edible plants. Therefore, primary and first grade teamed up and made posters depicting plants we eat.

Hopefully, we will all be feasting soon!

Round 2 SUCCESS!!

4th grade is already seeing success with our second round of plants! We have been growing our newest seed pods in a classroom window and soon they will be ready to be transplanted into our farm wall!

We will have one crop of butter crunch lettuce grown with specific hydroponic 'coated' seeds. They are pretty steadily coming along......but our biggest surprise has been the other crop we have been growing, dwarf peas. These seeds are not coated and are typically more suited for growing in soil. They were planted just a week ago and they are really thriving already! Check out the pics below! Out second grade friends will be growing dwarf peas in soil so that we can compare which one had ore success......can't wait to see the results! Stay tuned.......

If at first you don't succeed...... TRY TRY AGAIN!

Fourth grade has learned A LOT about what not to do with hydroponics, but we also learned a lot about what we can do better next time! While out cilantro, kale, mint, and basil did not survive, we are going to try again. We discovered that we did not allow them enough growing time before we transferred them into the tower. This time around, we are planting butter lettuce seeds that are coated in a special nutrient that will help them survive and become hearty. Once the plants have grown to a height of about 4 inches, we can transfer them to the farm wall.

Stay tuned to see out newest adventure in hydroponics!!

Remember: FAIL = First Attempt In Learning  :)

Salsa Fiesta

Winter blues got you down?

Head over to Primary in a few months as we grow all the ingredients for salsa from seed to table.

Tomatoes, cilantro, chives, peppers, and even strawberries will be featured in our homemade salsa. 

¡Bienvenidos!

More Peas Please

2nd grade is gearing up for a new planting challenge! We have learned so much about how to take care of our plants due to our successes and failures. We will be planting and comparing peas and butter crunch lettuce using soil and hydroponics. Students will be meeting with 4th grade students to compare results and in the end make a decision about which they think worked better. We are excited to begin this journey and can't wait to share our results and progress with you!

Out with the Old in with the New

Third graders are going to be using hydroponic butter crunch seeds to see how they grow in soil!

We will be using our knowledge of plants to research Mexican culture. We will examine how their climate influences what they grow and eat.

New Seeds, No New Fish

5th grade's long, leafy, green lettuce began to look like this during the last week of January:

We found out that leaf lettuce comes to maturity after about 40 days. Since we planted ours in October, we should have harvested them around Winter Break. But keeping them in the Aquaponics system a month longer caused them to become less than appetizing.

On January 29, we planted new seeds in our peat pods: a lettuce seed designed just for hydroponics systems, cilantro, basil, spinach, and squash. When the seeds have sprouted to about 3-4 inches long, we will transfer them into the Aquaponics system and start all over again with new, healthy plants!  This time, we'll be sure to harvest our plants before they wilt.

Here is what we wonder:
-Will the different seeds sprout at the same rate?
-Which sprouts will need the most sunlight (so we can place them in the middle of the Aquaponics system)?
-Will the new lettuce seeds really grow better than our first lettuce plants?
-Will having so many different types of plants affect the health of the fish?
-When will the fish lay its eggs?