Peas Please!

Hello friends,

After week one of planting our seeds in our raised garden beds, some of the students noticed teeeeny tiiiiiiny little sprouts beginning to pop their heads up from the soil.  We checked our predictions and discussed whether they were correct.  For those students who made predictions and were incorrect, we discussed possible reasons why this might have been the case - were the seeds not getting adequate light or water?  Did they have enough space to grow?  The students also wrote another sentence or two in their garden journals about how their seeds were doing after week one.

THEN, during week two of our seed planting, we observed some significant growth!  Here's a few photos of the progress our sprouts have made since we first planted them on April 30th/May 1st:

We've got sunflowers!

Peas please! Love those tiny tendrils.

   

We'll have some great pumpkins ready for this autumn.

Aren't they just awesome?!  After two weeks, each type of seed we planted is successfully sprouting - radish, broccoli, carrot, lettuce, green bean, pumpkin, peas, and sunflowers.  I'm bringing in some tomato seeds next week to plant in some of our empty squares, in addition to more bell peppers.

Since our peas are sprouting so nicely, I decided that next week I'll read the Firsties a book by Susan Grigsby called First Peas to the Table.  This book combines fiction and nonfiction elements and incorporates science, history and social studies.  Here's a quick picture of the book cover:

I found an awesome Teacher Guide to go along with this book that offers tons of great standards-based lessons and fun activities from the National Agriculture in the Classroom website (check my Fun Links page for links to this website and many others that offer great educator and student resources for Garden-Based Learning).  The lessons and activities in this teacher guide incorporate higher order thinking skills (see Bloom's Taxonomy) and appeal to various types of learners (see Multiple Intelligences).  Some activities and lessons from this teacher guide that I'm considering doing with my Firsties next week include:

• A Table Discussion and Questioning Session - great for my interpersonal Firsties

• "Word Detectives" vocabulary activity using context clues in the text

• Pea Blossom Dance - encourages students to use interpretive dance movements to mimic the life cycle of a pea plant. FUN!

• Inventions - the book helps build background about how pea plants grow and require a trellis to climb.  This activity would be fun for my kinesthetic, logical, and visual/spatial learners to come up with an innovative way to build a trellis for our own pea plants in our garden.  

• Creative Writing 
• Who's Been Nibbling in Our Garden?
• Writing From The Creature's Point of View

I can't wait to check the book out from my library and get started next week!  

Until then my friends...

Garden Predictions

Hello and Happy May!

We only have five weeks left of school - EEK!  I'm feeling excited and a bit overwhelmed.  Trying to fit in all the lessons I want my Firsties to experience is hard work even without a deadline fast approaching!

Learning how to make predictions is an important primary grade skill.  Making predictions helps strengthen both reading strategies and science skills, and can be an exciting way to gain student engagement in a topic. 

After selecting the seeds they wanted to plant in our garden and then planting them, the students each wrote a prediction about which seed they thought would sprout first.  Here's a few samples of their writing:

We've been anxiously awaiting for their seeds to begin sprouting so we can see if any of the predictions were correct!

In the meantime, here's two of my Firsties who found a bell pepper growing in the garden from the garden's previous caretakers.  I snapped a photo of them in the process of documenting it and the second photo is theirs!

Caterpillar to Chrysalis to Butterfly

Hi there!

We've been busy in first grade!  We've been studying plants and insects like worms, ladybugs and butterflies.  We were so thrilled when a very nice parent from another first grade classroom brought in caterpillars for all the first grade classes a couple of weeks ago.  She has lots of milkweed growing in her yard, and caterpillars (especially the ones that turn into Monarch butterflies!) love eating milkweed.  She brought in some of the milkweed leaves so the caterpillars had food in their cages, and they didn't require anything else from us!  We observed them as they crawled around for a few days munching through the milkweed, and then, almost before our eyes, each one began to form a chrysalis around itself.  I felt very lucky that my Firsties were able to witness one of the caterpillars forming a chrysalis - although there's many great resources for teachers to show this process, nothing beats seeing it with your own eyes!  Unfortunately it happened so quickly I wasn't able to get a photograph of it.  We continued studying the life cycle of a butterfly in class and used these great resources:

Books:

Butterfly Life Cycle (non fiction) by Jeff Bauer

    Monarch Butterfly by Gail Gibbons

      The Life Cycle of a Butterfly by Bobbie Kalman

Technology:

I found two GREAT resources for the iPad for teaching the life cycles of plants and butterflies to help differentiate and integrate technology into the curriculum.  You can buy them separately or as part of an Elementary School Science Bundle (Sprout Labs, LLC) in the App Store.

This one is called Plants HD:                                               This is called Butterfly HD:

                                    

 I also found these YouTube videos and my Firsties loved them!

This one is a song for all those musical learners!

This one uses real footage but is told from the perspective of the egg/caterpillar/butterfly.

This video also uses real footage but does not have narration, just subtitles.

Materials:

Here's a few links to some Teachers Pay Teachers resources I used during this week of butterflies and life cycles.  They were all very useful and effective for my Firsties!

Butterfly Life Cycle Freebie by creator Happily Ever After Education

This FREE (yay!) resources has 2 foldable readers about the life cycle of a butterfly - one with pictures and one for students to draw their own pictures!  Also, there's a fun Butterfly Life Cycle Wheel Cut and Paste activity for your students to use as a personal anchor for learning.

Here's a couple of (FREE!) Butterfly Life Cycle Observation Templates by creator that we used to observe and record the stages of metamorphosis (we did three observations total).

Butterfly Life Cycle Observation Journal by creator Sarah Peters on Teachers Pay Teachers

Butterfly Life Cycle Observation Mini Book by Susan Jones - TGIF of Teachers Pay Teachers

And finally, here's an  A W E S O M E  Butterfly Life Cycle PowerPoint by creator Linda Post - The Teachers Post which has tons of great vocabulary, differentiated reading levels, and black and white versions for easier use.  It costs $3.50 to download and is well worth it!

We Let Our Butterflies Go!

To end our week, we let one of our caterpillars-turned-butterflies go!  Beforehand, we had a whole group discussion about some things we learned about why butterflies are good to have in gardens, and then decided to let the butterfly go near our gardens in hopes that it would stick around.  Here are some photos of us setting our little friend free!