F&G Begins!

Today was my first day of teaching summer camps. Camp runs from 9 am to 3 pm. I have seven campers, a range of boys and girls. We covered seeds (including snacks of poppy seed and sesame seed bagels with almond butter in the AM and popcorn in the PM), soil ( The Mountain that Loved a Bird by Alice McLerran and A Log's Life by Wendy Pfeffer) and compatible and incompatible plants (from Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening by Louise Riotte) and made our garden plan with index cards. We did shake tests of soil samples from around the campus and I sent each child home with a quart mason jar and instructions to bring in a soil sample from home. We also gathered different types of leaves on our Nature walk and decorated the outside of our journals with leaf prints.

Tomorrow is weather, water and sunshine, shadows and beginning our sundial project and starting seeds in peat pots. We are also talking about root vegetables and I am doing "The Turnip" for storytelling with the figures from Anne Moze and a gigantic turnip which I needle felted.

By the way, Cook's Illustrated magazine has phenomenal cover illustrations of different types of produce. I will be bringing in a sample issue I got (you can see it on Amazon, it is the issue with the blue bowl of persimmons on the front) which has a lovely "poster" of different types of Root Vegetables on the back. The back illustrations are much nicer than the front since the magazine title and so on are not on them, they are full page. Gorgeous. Honestly, I could see getting a subscription just to frame them for the homeschool classroom. To request a sample you can simply go to their website.