The kids had plenty of Pioneer Spirit this week as we continued to explore and enjoy new territory together at Highland Learning Studio. The cooler weather (finally!) invited us outdoors more, for games of elbow tag and foursquare or catch with our new playground balls.
The kids enjoyed the challenge of a cumulative memory game, in which they took turns adding in alphabetical order what they would take in their wagon trip West: "I'm going west, and I'm taking Alexander, a barrel, cloth, a dog, Elex . . . hydrogen, ice cream . . . a lantern, a monster, Nick . . . a quill, a rabbit, a super saturated solution, tar, a unicorn, a vest, worms, a xylophone, yarn, and a zoo." We read a great picture book together, Going West by Jean Van Leeuwen and Thomas B. Allen, which describes the emotional rather than historical journey of a family leaving behind "civilization" and their first year of settlement in the American prairie. The kids then wrote a packing list for their own trip West in which they had to imagine what they would take in their covered wagon and what they must leave behind. Okay, this was a creative writing assignment and it showed. The kids later put their imaginations to further use as they acted out a role-play game of pioneers during free time.
We worked together to make Crop Harvest Planning tables, in which we used mathematical reasoning rather than counting with a calendar to complete the table. The students organized the information by crop name, days to harvest, and calculated expected date of harvest for each crop we will plant in our garden. Thursday afternoon ended with an art project, in which we recycled old spices (including some from the 1950s that I inherited!) into new pieces of "spice glitter" art.
For part 2 of our garden planning, the students drew diagrams of their individual straw bales and selected up to 3 crops to plant in their bale. They created a scale (1 inch = 1 foot) to map out the proportions of their bales and used corresponding measurements to plan how many plants could grow in each bale. They used skip counting or division to map out their planting, then made labels from yogurt containers to identify the crops in the garden.
After cultivating each bale and setting out seeds, they worked together to spread topsoil & compost over their bales and then watered with compost tea made by our very own worms (with student help).
Yes, we had to add some store-bought compost, but we enriched this with our worm castings and as much home-grown compost as we had available. We added a compost heap to one side of the straw bale garden, so that next planting season we'll have more home-grown compost to use.
Watering with our compost tea that steeped all week. Yum!
We also found time for cleaning the schoolhouse together, drawing, and playing a variety of math games, including tangrams (geometry), Countdown, and Totally Tut (both arithmetic operations games).
Watering with our compost tea that steeped all week. Yum!
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