First Grade Digs Gardens!: 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.