School’s out for summer!  (Hooray!)

Here are some of the activities we did in the school garden in April and May…

We welcomed Spring by finding and putting together these homemade puzzle pieces:

We also made spring collages from seed catalogues for our bulletin board.

The upper grades harvested our compost made from school lunch scraps.

They loved looking for and “rescuing” worms to throw back into the bins.

To complete the cycle, we carried our compost buckets to the front of the school to fill some of our large flower pots that PTO plans to fill with flowers.

We also used it to help pot up some indoor plants for a garden sale at Open House.

Stacey from Wynona Flats helped me set up a local honey taste test: buckwheat, sage and avocado.  We taught students that honey looks and tastes different depending on which flowers bees were visiting.  As always, we also emphasize the importance of buying local and knowing about your food.  Shirley and Jenny,  Garden Beneficials, led this mini-lesson.

After learning the top ten agricultural commodities in California (by sales), we headed out to the garden to find little California shaped signed with each item.  Signs had words which helped students solve the puzzle on their clipboards.

 

After school students made garden aprons.

On one very hot day, we played games with homemade play dough.  Here:  Make something in the garden.  (She made Mr. Tree.)

We continued experimenting with Sage Garden Project lessons: blueberry cornmeal muffins.

We planted, watered, observed, drew and gobbled up peas.

 

Finally, one of my favorite teachers of all time, Mrs. Dawson, retired.  Aside from being both of my boys’ first grade teacher, she has always been a friend to the garden.  She is genuinely excited every time we have a lesson, and she supports us through managing the entire BoxTops program which funds garden maintenance.  To honor her, we placed a beautiful wind sculpture in Bed #3 (where the UCLA flag from her class has always been planted) with scrabble letters going down the pole which read, “We love Mrs. Dawson.”

Have a lovely summer!  Thank you for reading along for the 2015-2016 school year!