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.