Cascadia Elementary 3rd Grade Garden Program
What a perfect day for garden class with Earth Day this week, the day after we meet for garden class. This week our focus was flowers! What is their function? Why do we see flowers on some of our annual plants and not on others?
First we gathered outdoors in the garden, to have a little lecture and discussion on flowers. The day was absolutely lovely, still a little cold, but the sun was out with blue skies, and wispy clouds. We discussed the importance of a flower to a plant. It is a reproductive feature the plant develops. Pollinators are attracted to the bright colors and they form a beneficial relationship, the bees and other insects with the plants, the plants get to spread their pollen and be pollinated, and the insects get sweet tasty nectar.
To demonstrate their new understanding of a flower, we passed out worksheets with an image of a flower on it. The 3rd graders labeled the parts of a flower; stigma, psitil, sepal, anther, filament, petal, ovary, stamen, and style.
Then we broke into our three groups of 7-8 children. Again this week I lead students in the annual vegetable garden. We observed the flowering kale and arugula. We practiced our food critics skills again, tasting the kale and arugula flowers, observing it tastes quite like broccoli, yet a bit sweeter. This is because kale, arugula, and broccoli are in the same brassica family. Though even though arugula leaves taste quite spicy compared to the mild taste of kale leaves, both their flowers taste about the same.
Finally as we cleaned up for the day, tidying the garden after all the third graders had left, we noticed three lonely tomato plants sitting in the corner of our garden. Where did they come from? Why are there green fruits on them (it’s much too early/cold for tomatoes to have produced fruits already)? We planted them in our school garden, later to find out that a local indoor hydroponic store had heard about our school garden program and had gifted us some indoor grown tomatoes! Rowan our lead garden educator went to the local business to thank the employees! There is certainly community support for amazing programs such as ours.
Tiny Trees Outdoor Preschool
Being an outdoor preschool at a populated park there are some risks to account for, such as lost children. Being that this is Tiny Trees’ first year of operation means not all factored in risks have taken place yet. This week was the first time a student was lost… Here is the story…
Thursday morning class was going well and smoothly as any other day. For the lesson of the day we simply were exploring a park and playing on a large hill, not far from the designated classroom. Some children were picking flowers in the grass hill and field, others were running up and down (some rolling and tumbling) the hill, and a few were drawing with chalk on the sidewalk. I was pretty focused on the kids playing with chalk, we drew hop-scotch courses, and drew flowers and other things. We had maybe all been playing for 30minutes, and then it was time to head back to our usual class space under the trees were the parents would soon be to pick up the children. As we gathered I overheard the lead teacher with worry in her voice ask the assistant teacher where one of the children was. I quickly did a head count, we were missing one. Immediately the lead teacher was panicking, not so much so that the other children were worried though. We quickly had to jump to action! We asked the kids if they noticed where she went. None did though. As the assistant teacher lead the rest of the class back to be picked up by the parents, the lead teacher and I split up the park and began searching everywhere. Jefferson Park is roughly 50 acres, including a golf course. Excluding the golf course, probably 25 acres. It took us 20 long minutes to find the three year old. She was under a big toy playing with a random child her age. When we asked her what happened, she said “I made a friend and we wanted to play.” She thought nothing of her straying from the group. Obviously though we were all sick and scared something awful had happened, but were so relived to find her just having fun no care in the world. It was a terrifying experience, but all was alright and we plan on having a lesson on safety the next week. Through this experience I learned to stay as calm as possible not to scare the other children, not to get mad at the lost child but rather exclaim how worried everyone was and why it is important to not leave the group.
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