bird feeders | What's not to like?

As is our tradition, let’s take a look around at the last couple months of garden/education at Julian Elementary (aka “Garden Tour”). We’ll start inside, because due to wet, windy and freezing weather, that’s where we’ve been doing a lot of our lessons.

Potentially messy inside, but do-able if you lay all of the supplies out just right: pinecone bird feeders.

We hung all 80 of them from the plum tree the next day:

Younger students are now studying the edible “flower” part of the plant so roasted cauliflower in my portable oven was our taste test–another big hit. Favorite interaction: Students were exclaiming how it was their new favorite food. “It’s good…plus 100!” “It’s good, plus 200!” And then a little boy with a cute grin declared: “It’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten, the last number in the world TIMES the last number in the world!”

Another fun indoor lesson covered an introduction to soil. We talked about the differences between sand, silt and clay and then looked at samples under the microscopes.

Using a great lesson from Sage Garden, we then mixed up edible “soil” with different size cereals and yogurt.

Teak Nichols from the Julian Apple Growers Association was our guest speaker for three classes, teaching a lesson on pruning fruit trees. Local fruit association working with a public school: a real apples to apples connection!

A “search and find” activity gave students clues to things in the garden. Once they found the items, they found “words” which they plugged into a puzzle on their sheet.

The completed puzzle read:

“Your mind is a garden, Your thoughts are the seeds, You can grow flowers, Or you can grow weeds.” We had a short chat about what that could mean, dovetailing with our school-wide focus on character education.

Students started making educational signage for our upcoming California Thursdays event–more on that to come.