It's Garden Class Time! (freebie too)

It seems like I should have some witty way to say why I haven't posted on my blog in a while, but one isn't coming to me. It's just been a very busy month. I agreed this year to be the Student Council advisor at my school. The 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students on SC are so wonderful! It's been fun to work with older kids. A few were even in my class in first grade. I also said that I would change the display cases in the two hallways. I was so tired of looking at the same thing for 6 months at a time or nothing at all. So I changed one to an Olympics display. First it was a countdown to the Olympics, now I'm posting photos from the newspaper. In addition I'm on 2 district committees. One of them I'll get paid for but we're developing a first grade curriculum map of the CCSS so that's going to take some time. It's just been a busy time and I haven't been creating until recently (meaning last Thursday).

Once a week for February and March, my class gets to go to Garden Class for 20 minutes. We have a fabulous parent who plans activities for kids to explore, cook, and harvest veggies from the garden. She's fantastic! She even brought in tree stumps and had upper grade kids paint the tops of them so they could be used as stools for the kids to sit on while she's teaching. I don't have a picture of those, unfortunately, but here a couple pictures I snapped on our first visit.

So I decided that after each visit I'd have the kids write something about what they learned. After the first 2 classes I just handed them an index card to write it on. Last week I thought a garden class journal might be nice that way they could draw a picture as well and have a keepsake when our classes end. Here's what they look like:

During the 2nd garden class they kids got to explore dirt from the worm bin and search for earthworms. Our garden teacher/parent had one child stand still while another moved away from him. The kids were supposed to stay STOP when they thought the student had gone length of the longest earthworm. It turns out that the longest earthworm ever found was over 20 feet long. Can you imagine? Yucky! I thought more kids would write that they learned that, but this was the only one.

Here's another one:

Love that the person is even holding a magnifying class!

If you'd like any of these garden freebies, just click on the picture below (one click gets you everything). It's also on TN- just click here.  Feel free to pin it too!

cute polka dot background from Ruby Slippers

Does your school have a school garden?

I'll leave you with a picture of Selena who can find fun in the ordinary things.