Garden Study

Since returning from Spring Break, we have spent a lot of time working in our discovery garden. We used garden tools to spread mulch and to prepare our flower boxes for planting. We learned that spring is the best time to begin planting seeds. To become experts about gardening, we turned to several non-fiction resources such as books, websites, and online video streaming. 

We first learned about the needs of plants: air, water, space, and soil. We discovered that most of those are also important for us to live. We learned how seeds turn into plants, as well as explored different types of seeds. We planted sunflower, zinnia, cilantro, and spearmint seeds in our classrooms. We cared for the seeds by watering them and documented their growth. 

We spent a lot of time outside exploring the beautiful spring blooms outside of our school.

We learned about the parts of a plant and each of their functions.

We collected nature items from outside and brought the outside indoors by creating beautiful nature collages to hang in our classroom.

To share our learning, we painted different types of flowers to display outside of our classroom.

We learned that not only can you plant a flower garden, but you can plant vegetable gardens too! We read several books about planting vegetable gardens and learned about what vegetables we can plant in our garden at school.

We decided to plant cucumbers along with cilantro and sunflowers in our class flower box. Other classes have planted lettuce, potatoes, onions, carrots, broccoli, and peppers.

We have learned the appropriate way to care for seedlings and have done a wonderful job taking responsibility for weeding and watering our flower box.

While caring for our garden, we noticed several tiny critters in our garden. This led to an investigation about insects and other bugs. We learned that all insects have three body parts (head, thorax, abdomen) and six legs. Worms, slugs, spiders, and centipedes are not considered insects because they do not fit the description of an insect! We spent time sketching the insects we observed in our Exploration Journals.

Outside of our classroom, we created a vegetable garden to show others what types of vegetables can grow in a vegetable garden, as well as, the importance of planting vegetable seeds in rows. 

We also created a flower garden that included the parts of a flower. We showed the insects you can find in a flower garden like ants, caterpillars, and butterflies. Our learning about plants, gardens, and insects are included on the display.