2/6
My work this week began at the Growing Gardens office. To prepare for the days activities I had to hole punch 15 little baggies, cut up paper towels to fit in the baggies and then cut string long enough to hang around a students necks. Usually a project for kindergarteners, we decided to let the kids made bean buddies because it is a way for students to watch their own plant sprout and have the opportunity to take a project home, which is always fun. Bean buddies are when you put a unsoaked lima bean into a baggie with a wet paper towel, we encourage the students to place it somewhere where this is sunlight or heat. A string is attached to a hole in the baggie as a fun way for the students to wear it as a necklace. The lima bean will sprout and the students can watch it grow. After prepping the buddies for the students I threw together more booklets as I did last week and we headed out the door for Glenfair.
**I feel it’s important to add that an angel in the office did an ice cream run to a local and organic shop, we all get to enjoy some sweets. I wish I caught the name of the shop, it was so good! The dairy free coconut lemon was my favorite.
Anyways, the Glenfair schedule was:
- 3:00 to 3:30 – Second lunch
- 3:30 to 3:50 – Circle time with lima beans
- 3:50 to 4:20 – Recess and garden time
- 4:20 to 4:50 – Bean buddies
- 4:50 to 5:15 – Pickle tasting
Today we had a lot more students absent than normal, which was fine because the class was a lot calmer. At circle time, we started with a mystery box activity where one student felt the lima bean without seeing it, and the other students guessed what was in the box, they also couldn’t see. We then showed the kids the anatomy of a lima beans from its coat to its nutrients inside to its sprout and leaf. They enjoyed it a lot because the bean was easy to dissect. After circle time we went to recess and to my surprise the kids got bored very quickly and wanted to jump to garden time! We went into the garden and explained to them what weeds were, they then went and picked some weeds which they not only had fun playing in dirt but it saves us some time when we begin harvesting the garden in the upcoming weeks.
When we went inside and showed them the bean buddies some of them had actually already made them in a previous Growing Gardens course, so they didn’t want to do it again. It was funny because when the other students who hadn’t made bean buddies before started making them, the students who acted too cool to make them again asked me and the garden instructor for some supplies to make their own, I loved it, they saw how fun it was again. Moving onto the pickle tasting was great because many of the kiddos were astonished that you can pickle more than just cucumbers. We let them try red cabbage, red and yellow peppers. They LOVED the red cabbage but didn’t really like the peppers, some of them were so drama about it. The students were sitting at two tables so when I went to give the second table cabbage they said “eww no!” but the second I told them the other table liked the cabbage, they got interested and wanted some. They are so influential on each other and their reactions I’m coming to find out. The best we can do every week is to push the students to try something they haven’t had before they judge it. They usually become pretty open to trying new things when they see their friends do it. One of my favorite students, Abdi, never liked pickles and really didn’t want to try any, I told him to take a little bite of each and he did. He didn’t necessarily like all the pickles but to see him step out of his comfort zone was pretty cool and he was very sweet about it.