Autumn Activites

It's starting to feel a little more like fall. Chillier mornings, a few days of light rain, changing leaves, pumpkins, persimmons... I love this time of year! And so do our students... especially if they are doing fun things like dehydrating persimmon chips or painting pumpkin art or making pumpkin cookies!

Fourth grade enjoys picking Hachiya persimmons the garden!

Cutting persimmons to go in the food dehydrator...

Persimmons ready to dehydrate!

Kindergarteners get into shapes as they design, cut out and glue their pumpkins on black paper!

Step one of 3rd grade's pumpkin art project: drawing pumpkins and painting them by mixing colors.

Next steps: cutting out their painted pumpkins & creating a night scene for their 'Moonlit pumpkin patch'. 

Adding final touches!

Fourth grade also made a yummy no-bake Pumpkin, Oat, Raisin Cookie! The recipe was super simple -- find it here.

Catching up in the 'new' school year!

Kindergarten students weighing a pumpkin that they harvested from the garden

Summer went by so quickly; it's hard to believe that we're 8 weeks into the school year and it's fall now!

Here are some highlights so far...

Kindergarten is getting acquainted with the garden. They LOVE visiting the garden and are full of energy! They have used their senses to explore the sights, smells, tastes, sounds and textures of the garden. They have used tools such as magnifying lenses, rulers and scales to get to know the garden and the garden produce better. And they have made some beautiful art to showcase their observation skills. Fun!

After visiting the garden chickens, kindergarteners made their own chickens!

After learning about what plants need to survive, and sprouting seeds in their classroom, kindergartners also made their own 'green house' to grow pea seeds at home over fall break.

A 'green house' with pea seeds ready to sprout!

decorating the 'green house'

First graders learned a lot about seeds -- they worked in teams to solve a sorting challenge to answer the questions 'Is it a seed?'

They learned about Johnny Appleseed, harvested apples from the garden apple trees and collected the seeds inside their apples to see if all apples have the same number of seeds. And they made their own 'seed heads' at the end of class to take home and watch grow!

A 'seed head'!

Second grade learned more about the parts of a plant, how to answer the question 'Is it a plant?' and also clarified the meaning of 'living vs non-living'.

plant part art

Students created collages of living and non-living things

Wow! That's a lot! Here are a few more highlights:

Fifth graders made applesauce from apples they harvested together. And they also harvested all the spent sunflowers so that we can save the seeds to plant again in the spring. We had some huge sunflowers!

Fifth grade chefs making apple sauce!

One of the many mega-sunflowers that fifth graders harvested!

It's hard to believe that we're already a quarter of the way through the school year! We're off to a great start in the garden and looking forward to a lot more adventures.