Edible Peace Patch Blogs

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Thursday, March 15, 2012

DECOMPOSERS

Hello all!

The garden is flourishing and the kids are HUNGRY! On Thursdays, Randi and I have two classes- kindergarten and first graders.  Our kindergartners are eager learners and constantly asking and answering questions.  This makes my job a little easier considering the material we are throwing at them!  The first graders are also little sponges, wanting to know more and more about our garden and all the background information.

This week is all about decomposers! That means, BUGS BUGS BUGS!!

The Lakewood Edible Peace Patch Garden gets most of its help from roly polys:

These roly polys help aerate our soil and break down material to create rich, fertile soil composition for our plants to flourish. 

Our classes found most of these creepy crawlers underneath the rocks in the pollinator garden. They were so intrigued by what can happen underneath the ground, out of our eye site.  

Our exploration was successful and afterward both grade levels were able to complete the lesson plan, a challenge we are facing but assuredly overcoming with each weekly lesson plan.  After the exploration, the kids drew what they saw in the garden and shared with their classmates, Randi, me, and their teachers.  They all seemed genuinely proud of what they had accomplished today in the garden.  

Once the real work was done, Randi taught them about metamorphosis.  Have you ever tried teaching a 6 year old the word 'metamorphosis'? It is nearly impossible, but, we felt as though they were able to grasp the concept behind the word--egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.  The kids really seemed to want to understand what everything was and I'm curious to see if they remember it next week.  After the hard stuff, the first graders made their own butterflies out of coffee filters and clothes pins! It was a lot of fun! Some of the final products are displayed throughout the garden! Come check them out at our harvest festival!

happy ides of march!

-sydney :) 

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