Welcome back Micheltorena! It’s great to connect with the kids, teachers and parents for another year. I’m pumped to talk about plant life cycle. Last year, we started so many seedlings, some made it and some didn’t – but since our classes are 6 weeks, some kids weren’t able to see how successful their crops were. Today, we got to see the good, bad and the ugly – which to me is all beautiful by the way because it’s all part of nature.
Our corn did so well. I have to say, I’m so proud of the kids for growing 3 sisters from scratch. I have experience garden friends who haven’t been able to do it, so this is such a proud moment for me. With the right amount of love, patience and lessons we’re able to do anything. 3 sisters is an important lesson because it marries native american history with the garden and it’s a way to discuss nutrition and the health benefits of corn, beans and squash. Native Americans did so much, in a sustainable and healthy way without much damage to our ecosystem.
We are also in the process of taking down our summer crops, some of the plants are completing their lifecycle and we need to get the soil ready for the next rotation – please let me know if you’d like to help. We can always use parent volunteers, for this, I kindly ask that we let the kids lead and we support their learning.
Lastly, for my humble brag. We were supposed to do an introduction day today but our kids are so well versed in the garden that we went straight into building Farmer Almanacs. The goal of their journal is to maintain a log of their garden visits, and tie it all back to language arts, math and science. More to come on this, but the kids are so at ease in the garden and I’m happy to see their self-directed learning when they journal. They got to pick a part of the garden and draw it – this is great for building observation skills.
Big thank yous to the teachers and the kids who really rolled up their sleeves and took ownership of the garden and started composting.
