Category: Growing Gardens

2/27

Due to the Youth Garden coordinator being out of town it was on me this week to run the day! She was very helpful in setting me up with curriculum to teach and a set schedule. Honestly, I was pretty nervous because it was my first time handling the kids on my own but due to last minute changes we were able to have a retired Glenfair teacher come in for a show and tell on mason bees! We adjusted the schedule quickly and I was able to not only have him come in but also 2 other drop in teachers to look over the kids.

To start the day, I came into the office early to make sure I had all the supplies I needed and to prepare for the day ahead. I also prepped the citrus fruit for our tasting which included oranges, blood oranges, kumquats, white grapefruit and pomelo. Some of these fruits I actually have never tried before so that was exciting.

The schedule for the day:

• 3:00 – arrive and meet with Mr. Pierce, the mason bee guy
• 3:30 – Second lunch begins
• 3:45 – Circle time to review mason bees
• 4:00 – Recess
• 4:20 – Mason bee lesson in the classroom
• 5:00 – Citrus fruit tasting

Mr. Pierce was not only very friendly but extremely popular in the school because he had taught there before, so the kids were very excited and engaged to see him. To learn about mason bees, Mr. Pierce discussed the differences between mason bees and other bees, showed the kids a bee house (that they could keep, mason bees do not make hives), and taught the kids how they reproduce (cocooning, larvae, early life). He actually brought in mason bee tubes that we all got to keep open and remove the baby mason bee cocoons from. The kids laughed a lot because they were filled with little mason bee poops. After we got all the cocoons and looked at the differences between male and female, Mr. Pierce washed the cocoons to put into a tupperware and store in the fridge. Mason bees are interesting because they will actually birth themselves from their cocoons when it’s warm enough (springtime) so keeping them refrigerated until they can be released is important (the school was warm so the bees might think it’s already spring). The kids really wanted to open a cocoon to see a baby bee so when Mr. Pierce opened it the baby bee was alive! All the kids passed the baby bee around and were super intrigued by it.

After we cleaned up the mason bees and washed our hands, I served the kids the fruit which they loved. They surprisingly loved the pomelos and the kumquats the most. I personally thought the pomelos looked unappealing but when you ate them they were super sweet and yummy. All in all, it was a really fun day!

2/13

This week was insect week! I started my day at 12 pm with my field supervisor to do a mid-quarter check in, kind of like what we do at Evergreen. We discussed what was going well, what wasn’t, if there were any surprises so far and we chit chatted around these topics for a while. I came into the internship with little expectation, just to expand my knowledge on gardening and hang with the kids and that is exactly what I have gotten and more, so I’m very pleased. She gave me nice feedback, thanking me for my consistency. I guess interns in the past had a habit of not showing up which is beyond me but everyone has their own situations going on in their life.

After our meeting, I was put on the task of forming fruit/vegetable insect snacks! They’re not really insects but rather food formed into looking like bugs, such as ants on a log, you can find more examples I made in my image gallery and above this post. I made several examples as a way to show the kids later in class for the activity we would be doing, I honestly had a blast.

The schedule at Glenfair will be different now because they changed their dismissal format. Kids have to stay in class longer until their bus number or pick up announcement is made, so we have a little less time with the kids but thats okay, not by too much.

• 3:20 to 3:35 – Second lunch
• 3:35 to 3:50 – Circle time
• 3:50 to 4:10 – Recess
• 4:10 to 4:25 – Garden time
• 4:25 to 4:45 – Ladybugs and aphids game
• 4:45 to 5:15 – Food art

We only had 9 students present so it was a fairly easy day energy wise. Circle time involved asking students what they knew about bugs and the garden, we then did another mystery box challenge with a fake bug. We showed them the life cycle of several bugs with little figurines such as bees, ladybugs and butterflies. They LOVED the little toys to the point where they were fighting over who can hold the most. After circle time was recess, then we moved straight into garden time where we asked students why ladybugs are so important for fighting off aphids, they were mind blown! My favorite part of the day was when we showed them the ladybug and aphid costumes they would wear to play tag. Of course they fought over who could wear what but we let everyone have a turn and they were willing to share.

To play the game, the ladybugs had to tag the aphids before the aphids tagged the “plant” (a student wearing screen costume sleeves). They went nuts over it. When we were all finished up we went into the classroom to recreate the bug snacks I showed them, that I made. They got to use strawberries, celery, dried blueberries, apples, grapes and sunflower seeds. With toothpicks, some kids recreated a caterpillar with the grapes while the majority just made random fruit monsters. They got to eat the fruit along the way and all in all had a fun time doing it.

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.

1/30

To kick off this week, I started in the office at Growing Gardens as always. I spent 2 hours creating 30 little booklets from construction paper and staples for the kiddos. With these booklets they would make an alphabet book, each page pertains to a letter. They would be given seed catalogs, glue and scissors to cut out collages of pictures or words relevant to a letter in the alphabet and paste it onto the according page. These books were a lot harder to put together than you think….

We then loaded up and headed to Glenfair, the schedule was:

• 3:00 – Arrive to set up and meet the kids at second lunch
• 3:30 – Circle time
• 3:45 – Recess and garden time
• 4:15 – Art with the booklets and seed catalogs
• 5:00 – Food tasting
• 5:15 – Kids head out and clean up

This week focused on seeds, again! Garden time was actually a lot of fun because garlic started sprouting and the broccoli and cabbage was flourishing. We let the kids taste the broccoli and then noticed somebody had pulled some garlic with the roots out 🙁 so we let the kids replant them and some of them were so excited to do it. Art took some time because we worked on the booklets I made, the kids were super creative and asked for a lot of help when it came to finding plants that matched with the alphabet. The most questions I got was if cabbage, corn and cauliflower started with a C or a K… ha! We got a “new” student this week, he is registered in the class but has always been absent, I thought maybe he would be disconnected or not care much but he was super into everything we did! His collage was very creative, he was into replanting the garlic and in the garden he pulled me aside and politely asked to have some more broccoli. It made my day. We ended on the tasting lab that involved seed energy balls. We mixed oats, honey, sunflower butter and dried cranberries then had the kids dip their mix in chia seeds, many of them loved it. All in all a successful week.

1/23

This weeks work started in the office of course. I attended a 1 o clock mini presentation on mason bees, which I never actually heard of until this week! The speaker was a bee enthusiast who emphasized the importance in bees and educated groups in the PNW on native bees. I’ve always been familiar with honey bees or wasps, but she described mason bees as “the kind that won’t ruin your picnic”. They are small, black, do not sting unless absolutely necessary and my favorite fact was that they do not have just 1 queen bee, all females are queens and all males are worker bees! What a life. We also looked at other native bees and some are quite literally green which blew my mind. The picture below is a chart that explains the mason bee life cycle. You can quite literally keep the larva in your fridge (Growing Gardens already had some in theirs I got to look at) until it’s time for them to “blossom”.

After, I visited Glenfair where the focus was seeds! While we had a set schedule in mind, every.single.kid had the most energy I’ve seen in weeks so to explain seeds to them was nearly impossible (to be fair it was movie night at the school, they were pumped) so we ran them outside until their energy went down:

• 3 – 3:30 – Second lunch
• 3:30 – 3:45 – Circle time
• 3:45 – 4:15 – Recess/games
• 4:15 – 4:30 – Seed matching activity
• 4:30 – 5:15 – Popcorn!

The seed matching activity involved the students matching packets of seeds to a seed board while they guess which each seed is, they surprisingly did well! Very familiar with seeds, except the corn seeds which was funny because they looked like corn too. Once I asked them what the seed looked like they knew exactly what it was. We took so long on the popcorn because we had several groups of students actually take the kernels off cobs we collected and then popped the seeds that came off so they could actually see where popcorn comes from. They loved popping the popcorn and when they got their little bowls we asked them what seasonings they wanted on theirs. The options were: Chili, thyme and nutritional yeast. Almost all the students refused to try the chili until I put a little pile in their bowl to dip in, after that they were begging for chili, it was so cute.

 

1/16/18

This week started out at 12:30 pm in the Growing Gardens office beginning with a check in meeting. This meeting included weekly updates, highlights and ideas to be shared. Another intern and I were just sitting in listening while 3 garden instructors had a discussion, it was similar to an Evergreen-esc format of a seminar. After the meeting, until about 2:45 pm, I went over curriculum for the day with my garden instructor and laminated cards for a plant activity later. Hitting 3 pm, we were at Glenfair with a schedule as such:

• Second lunch – 3 to 3:30 pm
• Circle time – 3:30 to 3:45
• Recess – 3:45 to 4:05
• Garden time – 4:05 to 4:30
• Art/crafts and tasting lab – 4:30 to 5:00

The focus today was how plants grow and anatomy. Circle time was fun because we had the kids act out how a plant grows. They started as seeds on the ground with the lights off, we put fake soil on them (a brown blanket), spritzed them with water, had them slowly stand up as we turned on the light (sunlight) and had them spring up like a plant, it was adorable. After recess we went into the garden to use the mystery box. This included and covered box with a hole for the kids to put their hands in. They would feel for what was inside the box without seeing it and have the classmates guess what they were touching. Our mystery items were a root, a flower and a leaf. They thought it was funny to guess if there was a chicken inside of the box… oh boy.

To round out the day, we went inside to start arts/crafts which included using cards to organize the stages of a plant, seed to flower. They were really good at it! The next activity was to take cut up vegetables we brought (cauliflower, broccoli, red pepper, carrots, celery and sunflower seeds) and match them up on a piece of paper that resembled a flower. For example, broccoli and cauliflower would be the petals, celery the stem, carrots as roots and etc. You can see what I mean in my picture in this post or my instagram! After, kids got to eat their veggies with a yogurt dip we made. All in all, they surprisingly loved the veggies (a little scared of the peppers until they tried them), it was funny, some kids called them gross before they tried them and when I had them just try a little, some loved it!

1/9/18

First day of interning went well! I started off in the office at Growing Gardens at 12 pm where I went over the curriculum for the day to be used at Glenfair with Sasha, the Garden Coordinator. I also will be doing weekly office work, today that included planting Paperwhite to be used in the classroom. The students will measure each week how far the Paperwhite grows. Other office work was to tediously peel crayons used for a project later that day with the students. When office work was finished up, I read “Portland School Garden Assessment” by Anna Garwood, Pesha Wasserstrom, Scott Logan and Stephanie Steeves. This pdf was a study of local Portland school gardens on their use, funding, community involvement and importance. It was good background information for how impactful farm to school programs have become.

At 2:30 pm I headed over to Glenfair Elementary to begin working with the students. Our schedule went:

• 3pm – Students eat “second” lunch
• 3:30 pm – Head to the classroom to do circle time
• 3:45 pm – Recess
• 4:00 pm – Scavenger hunt in the garden
• 4:30 pm – Head back to the classroom to do leaf prints of leaves the students collected outside
• 4:45 pm – Apple and yogurt tasting lab
• 5:00 pm – Students head home and begin clean up

We worked with 2nd graders which was exciting but their attention spans only last so long so today I learned how to keep them busy while still learning. The scavenger hunt in the garden entailed students partnering up and identifying different plants as “soft” “hard” or “dead” “alive”. We went over what they found and they compared their findings with their peers. Ending on a food lab was fun because the students looked forward to it the most and absolutely loved the apples, some begging for the recipe for the cinnamon, honey yogurt we mixed!