CASCADIA ELEMENTARY 3RD GRADE GARDEN PROGRAM
I had been looking forward to this class all quarter! This week our main activity was to make seed balls. Seed balls are comprised of seeds mixed with wet clay and compost. The students would combine the ingredients together, getting quite messy in the process to make a little golf ball sized seed ball. The seeds were a mix of flowers, seeds harvested from the Beacon Hill Food Forest the year before and free seeds given out by generous cultivators. We will be holding onto the seeds balls until the final class with the children, to allow the balls to dry. What are the students going to do with the seed balls? Well good question, they will be able to be little guerrilla gardeners, equipped with these these seed balls (also known sometimes as seed bombs but clearly that is not the proper term in this setting and audience). They will be able to go out into their community to disperse these seed balls and throw them somewhere they might want to see flowers, benefiting local pollinators. We gave a brief lesson on pollinators to accompany this lesson, and the importance of having different flowers that bloom at different times giving a food source to multiple types of bugs.
This was just one of the activities the students participated in though. We also of course had to do a little garden maintenance. I took charge of a group of students in the annual garden beds, Jessica the other garden intern worked on the worm bin with students in the perennial garden, and Rowan lead the students in the seed ball activity. The students like usual rotated through the groups so everyone had an opportunity to participate in everything. In the annual garden we had lots of weeding to do, and tasting to do in the garden. We discovered that our carrots planted earlier this quarter had sprouted, and our radishes were looking really strong! Some wanted to pull them but after a bit more observation we decided to keep them in the ground longer for our end of the year potlatch!
Finally we did have some problems with the final class and class behavior. It was a beautiful day and obviously the kids were excited. Being the end of the day the kids were wild to say the least. Thus we were unable to get every group through the activities, so the last group lost out on the chance to make seed balls. This was disappointing, and will require more work from us to make seed balls on our time to hand them out at the end of the program. Mostly though I felt bad that only a select few of students could not participate in the activity because of out of hand behavior by some classmates.
Tiny Trees Outdoor Preschool
This was an interesting week. Rachel the lead educator at Tiny Trees was on vacation so the assistant teacher stepped up as lead, and a substitute came in to aid her. Luckily Rachel left a detailed itinerary for all of us, and through this I witnessed the lead educators crucial dedicated role above all other employees.
Wednesday we played a game that challenged the children’s accuracy and dexterity through target practice. With chalk we made targets, circles with a point system, and invited the children to toss pinecones at the targets. I found it interesting some kids struggled greatly making it even close to the targets, but they all had a great time, and no tears were shed because there wasn’t much competition other than personal praise for themselves.
Thursday our activity was to explore the senses, to accomplish this we took a short walk (but that equates to about a ten minute walk with preschoolers) to the Beacon Hill Food Forest just on the other side of the park. Children stuck their hands in the dirt, noses in flowers, and listened for birds and bees.
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