Gardening Day = SUCCESS!!

Well, I have to say that I am so proud of my pumpkins today.  We had a gardening day where we stayed outside basically ALL DAY, and it was a wonderful success.  Another class and I set up the activity, and opened it to all the classes if they wanted to participate. And they did, so we had children from babies to age 5 out on the playground working and playing all morning.  Then the VPKers went out again after lunch for another activity with some volunteers from the Arboretum.  It was wonderful. 


We had stations all over the playground:   A planting station.  Children planted seeds, one to take home and at least one for the big garden we are going to plant next month.

A Reading Station:  We brought books out about gardening and read them in the gazebo.  Children could come and go as they wished.

 

 

An Art Station:  Paints were set up, children could choose their own colors and paint anything they wanted.  For inspiration, we had a still life of sunflowers handy...

 



A Writing Station:  Colored pencils and clipboards with paper were set out, as well as a lovely bouquet of daisies.  Children spent a lot of time at this station....

 

And of course, a WEEDING STATION:  Self explanatory.  Children helped us clean out our beds for new planting.

 

 

After lunch, we went back out and tried out some fruits in our own fruit trees.  Mulberries are just getting ripe so we tried those out.

 

 

The loquat trees are producing like crazy too, so we tried some of those, then planted the seeds we had left.  Maybe someday we will have an orchard on our playground!

 

 

As a little bonus, a pineapple that Ms. Amie planted almost FOUR YEARS AGO has a baby pineapple on it, so we visited that.  No one in our class has ever seen a baby pineapple on the plant before so this was pretty special....

 

 

I'm feeling like there are going to be more gardening days in our future.  And that makes me happy.









 

Sewing and Quilting...and other stuff....

We are having a special event next month at our school, called "Come Grow With Us".  This is a spring event, and we are going to be adding to our organic garden , hopefully with a lot of really great vegetables, fruits and herbs.  But my point is that each class is making a fundraising project.  Ours is going to be a quilt.  First we traced each child's hand.  I hate to brag, but I have an EXTENSIVE collection of kid-friendly fabrics, so I brought in a huge bin and each child chose which one they felt expressed the true "them", and we cut them out.  Then we all practiced sewing on Ms. Amie's (my) sewing machine. 

 

The kids loved it!  I think I might bring the sewing machine back later for another project I'm thinking about.  I will definitely post photos when we finish the quilt.

 

 

 

Next came Dr. Seuss' birthday (the week of March 2).  We did a lot of fun things to celebrate:

 

We painted Cat in the Hat style hats with patterns of our choice, and posed for a group photo with them.

 

We read a LOT of Dr. Seuss books and use various props to retell the stories. 

 

 

 

 

After reading "The Foot Book", we traced our feet onto paper, and measured them with various items from our classroom.

 

 

We played a silly game called, "I Have, Who Has?", where everybody has to pay very close attention.



 

 

On to St. Patrick's Day....



 



 

 



 

Letter detectives looked around the classroom for words that start with various letters.

 

 

 

Dr. Linda Walters brought some students over from the biology department as well as some ocean friends to visit.  Not only did the kids get to learn some really interesting facts about the sea creatures, they could handle them if they wanted to!  There are definitely some benefits to being located on a university.