Five Senses In And Out Of The Garden

This week we are wrapping up our five senses unit with our kindergartners. I was trying to figure out a good way to get them outside for science. It still is pretty nice here in Wisconsin, although we did see our first frost in the courtyard and witnessed some frost burned leaves later on in the day, but that won't stop us from using the garden in any way we can. Here is what our little kiddos did in the garden this week.

Five Senses In An Out Of The Garden

We read this book to wrap up what we learned about our five senses. We also made a chart that helped up remember what our senses do. It is fun to see the kids really start to write and comprehend!

Paying Pickles Forward and More

Our garden has produced an amazing amount of vegetables. We have had an Open House, Open Garden picking which brought in over 200 people into our garden to reap the benefits of our planting. We also had a harvest gathering with over 145 people last week. We gathered vegetables and also ate together and had many presenters sharing garden cooking and more.

 What we want to teach our students is that it is great to get things, (picking veggies during club time, eating food that we make with harvested veggies...) but it is even better to give. We made pickles two weeks ago and now it is time to give to others. Our pickles are being given to our adult crossing guards and one jar is being given to our principal on Boss's Day on Wednesday. Our students in our Green Team Garden Club also picked a ton of cherry tomatoes as well. We made 22 bags of cherry tomatoes for our teachers. Here is the label that we used on the teacher bags. Our garden club enjoyed doing something nice for the teachers and others that help us grow.

Garden Thanks

 Our pickles we are paying forward. When we are in a pickle, we can always count on our crossing guards.

 We gathered a second harvest of dill. We are hanging it upside down so that we can use the dry dill to make dip this fall.

Some of our wonderful Green Team Garden Club with their new t-shirts!

Busy Weekend

Well, this is the first time I am just sharing a bit about my busy life. I have been trying to add posts that help you out, but this weekend, boy was it busy. After school on Friday I drove with one of my daugthers and my college daughter's boyfriends family(phew), to Mankato. My son and husband stayed back for my son's last football game. My son's team won and was undefeated this season. Proud mama, my buddy was the quarterback. My 16 year old daughter had a volleyball tournament, they are first in the conference now. Yea! It took us 6 hours, stopping for 20 minutes to eat. I was soooo tired, but it was worth the drive to see my oldest. I walked my first 5K for a cool t-shirt. We went bowling and even a bit of shopping. It sure is great to see your child after a few weeks, but I was wiped out, however we still had time on Sunday to set up for my almost 14 year old's birthday party. We are throwing a murder mystery party at Bubba's Bar. Should be fun stuff. I will post some other science help this week. Stay tuned.

Invertebrates and Symmetry

My school has created an Intervention and Enrichment block of time on our schedule, I/E allows me to work with 13 third graders in an enrichment class. I work with them in reading, writing, science, and math. Our first unit of study had us learning about invertebrates. I used Science A-Z to find a book that focused on this topic. We then used several graphic organizers to learn about non-fiction. We set up a science lesson testing Grow Gators. We tested to see if salt effects the growth rate of our animals. I found a cheaper version of the grow pets at the Dollar Store.We found that salt slows down the growth rate. We then went out to the garden after we learned about symmetry. We learned about rotation, transition, and reflection. We went to the garden to find examples of each type. We traced and even made rubbings. After that, we spent some time in the computer lab. I gave each group a type of invertebrate. They needed to find one picture of an invertebrate that showed rotation, transition, and reflection. We used the flip book to show what we learned typing together reading, writing, science, and math.

Symmetry Sheet

Harvest of The Month: Popcorn!

At Jefferson we have focused on tomatoes as our September harvest of the month veggie. Now, it's October and we are celebrating Farm to School Month. We have some after school programs that we are hosting that celebrate the apple and popcorn. We harvested our popcorn today. Take a look at our harvest.

  With the husks we made corn husk dolls to take home. We are letting our popcorn dry so that we can give them to our teachers to use for our award day fun. We used the book Popcorn for some fun facts. I even included a fun unit at my TPT store and a sheet for you to use if you would like. I used the sheet with my littles in 1st and 2nd grade.  Hope you enjoy!

Popcorn Poem

Harvest of the Month...Apples

My Farm to School Friends... this week is apple week here at Jefferson. Our kiddos are learning about apples by doing different science activities. We counted the number of seeds in different types of apples and read an apple book.  We also made an apple art project and made a graph of our favorite type of apple. We have an apple farmer coming into our after school program to share facts about apples and what he does for a living, and he is bringing apples to serve in our cafeteria. Here is a sheet that our kids used to make a bulletin board for our lunch room. Have at it.

Talking Apples

Toads, Frogs, Polliwogs...

First graders have been working on learning about different groups of animals. We learned about amphibians last week. They love the song we sing and choose to sing it over and over. I had them working on a life cycle sheet to help them understand the metamorphosis and change. Here is our chart and art activity and even the book we used.

Great book to use!