My Blog Posts from Teaching This Topic as a Main Lesson in 2021
Monday, June 7
- Classroom Routines: continue to hold Reading Meetings as children finish up their SSR books and are ready for a new title (a Reading Meeting is where we meet one-on-one and I recommend a book I think a child will like), continue daily one-on-one math lessons and/or individualized math practice with the hands-on Montessori materials
- Science: read How Whales Walked into the Sea by Faith McNulty, put together the beautiful all-wood Tree of Life from Waseca Biomes
one child was so taken by this lesson he called out excitedly, "Plants really are amazing! Usually you think of animals as the most amazing thing, but really plants and animals are the same amount of amazing, just in different ways."
- Plant Projects: water TMEPMOAT, check on the results of our vascular bundle experiments, care for baby seedlings, weed vegetable beds
- Honeybees: discover that our swarm trap has caught another swarm! Talib says that our backyard caught the first swarm of the season and the last (in all, he gathered over 20 swarms this year)
- Botany: introduction to & exploration of The Mustard Family
featured plants: cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, horseradish, kale, radish, turnip, rutabaga, honesty, woad, alyssum
read The Secret Combination to Mustard Island (Mustard Family) from Shanleya's Quest by Thomas Elpel
draw the flower of the Mustard Family on the chalkboard and explain terminology (sepals, petals, stamens, pistil)
take a walk around the yard to find plants in the Mustard Family
look at mustard seeds / powder / condiment
look at and take apart some Mustard Family vegetables from the grocery store (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts)
do pencil sketches of vegetables (b&w) in MLB, add the flower and how to identify a plant in the Mustard Family, list example plants
Tuesday, June 8
- Classroom Routines: instead of giving every student four identical Dixon Ticonderoga classic yellow pencils to keep in their school supply caddies, each pencil with the child's initials written on it in Sharpie, I decided it might work better if every child had a different color of pencil and that way we could see at a glance whose pencil was whose
with this idea in mind, I purchased many different colors of Dixon Ticonderoga pencils and let the children decide what color they wanted to be theirs
because everyone wanted to have the holographic pencils, I gave each child one to keep at home
here's how it turned out:
-
Z - neon green
KEL - neon blue
C - metallic teal
D - neon yellow
KWF - metallic purple
AH - metallic gold
M - metallic rose
AG - neon pink
KLL - classic yellow
E - metallic indigo
(and, by the way, it's working very well! and we are using the striped pencils with our gratitude journals)
- Shelters for the Outdoor Classroom: today we put up our two new Easy-Ups! thank you to the family who donated these to the school!
- Plant Projects / Nature: sunchokes germinated, plant kale and sugar snap pea seedlings, see the first hummingbird of the summer (on the honeysuckle vine by the burning bush), release our ladybugs into the vegetable garden (and the children took this opportunity to
look at them closely with their jeweler's loupes), final notes on the results of "What Will Celery Move to Its Leaves?" experiment
- peppermint extract - no
vanilla extract - no
maple syrup - yes
Hershey's syrup - yes
honey - yes (strong flavor)
olive oil - no (killed the plant)
Bragg's amino acids - yes
lemon juice - no
peppermint tea - yes (strong flavor)
red / blue / green food coloring - yes
- Botany: introduction to & exploration of The Pea Family
featured plants: green bean, sugar snap pea, snow pea, edamame, ice cream bean tree, redbud, tamarind, clover, mung bean, chickpea, red lentil, great Northern bean, black bean, canary bean, red bean
this family also includes licorice, jicama, popcorn plant, and carob!
read The Pea Islands (Pea Family) from Shanleya's Quest by Thomas Elpel
create dried bean mandalas
walk around the yard to find the tree that is from this family (redbud)
review the idea of an irregular flower (this does not mean "weird," it means not symmetrical... look at flowers from the Mustard Family and/or mandalas as an example of symmetry)
look at clover blossoms using jeweler's loupes and see the pattern of the Pea Family flower!
do pencil sketches (b&w) in MLB, add an explanation of how to identify a plant in the Pea Family, list example plants
hands-on lesson on the Nitrogen cycle using the Backyard Biome tapestry we wove several years ago (the post I linked to is full of pictures of this very cool lesson)
- Board & Card Games on a Rainy Afternoon: Cauldron Quest, Bird Bingo, Ravine, Passing Through the Netherworld, Cheats
Wednesday, June 9
Unscheduled Wednesday!
- today's activities included
enjoying lots of free play time
seeing a doe walk past with a brand-new baby fawn
using fallen Japanese Maple tree branches (trimmed from a neighbor's tree) as spontaneous brooms to sweep the sidewalk
trying to watch a fly through a jeweler's loupe
reading Gregor Mendel: The Friar Who Grew Peas by Cheryl Bardoe
making Lego Punnett squares (not my own idea... totally brilliant... we did it with Dragon Eyes with red being dominant and blue being recessive... "what color would this baby dragon's eyes be?")
having a Pea Family Feast (sugar snap peas, snow peas, local green beans, local pea shoots, sweet tamarind in the pods, tamarind candy)
adding The Pea Family to the MLBs (we waited until after the feast to do this since I knew many children would probably want to draw the tamarind pods)
running through the sprinkler (for those who wanted to get wet)
playing Ravine (for those who didn't)
having a Philosophy discussion about Time (if one of the definitions of "fun" is that you lose track of time, does it follow that every time you lose track of time you are having fun? is sleeping a kind of fun?)
With pandemic problems easing, having real fun needs to be taken seriously
The Washington Post - June 6, 2021
Thursday, June 10
- Botany: final activities for Peas (starting mung bean sprouts, reading A Weed is a Flower: The Life of George Washington Carver by Aliki)
Special Guest: Ms. Aimee, my co-teacher for this block, gave a presentation on Cucurbitaceae (The Gourd Family)
our talk about cross-pollination was a really nice follow-up to the book about Gregor Mendel!
discuss new terminology (perfect flower, incomplete flower, monoecious [1 household], dioecious [2 households]) and puzzles like seedless watermelon (it was a good thing we did our Lego activity yesterday because it helped children to be able to picture this better)
look at examples of foods from the Gourd Family (summer squashes [yellow squash, zucchini], winter squashes [spaghetti squash, acorn squash, butternut squash], cucumber, watermelon, bitter melon, pepitos) as well as a locally-grown luffa
Gourd Family Feast! students enjoyed seasoned pepitos, wedges of juicy watermelon, and summer squash spears and cucumber semicircles alongside roasted red pepper hummus and tzatziki dip
discuss archaeology and seeds!
my favorite story: the Gete-okosomin squashdo pencil sketches (b&w) in MLB, add an explanation of male and female flowers, list example plants in the Gourd Family
start our Pumpkin Patch!
the student who adopted Pumpkins is very excited about the idea of cross-pollination and hybrids; he planted three different heirloom varieties in the Mulch Mountain and we are eager to see if they germinate, spread out and take over that area of the yard, cross with one another, and give us some really cool pumpkins for Halloween!-
Red Warty Thing
Musquee de Provence
- Afternoon Play: Goobi, soccer, relaxing in the hammock, Pengoloo, Quixo, Dr. Eureka, Fiery Dragons
Friday, June 11
- Nature: see how the little baby fawn camouflages so perfectly against the fallen leaves under the magnolia tree! harvest the first cherry tomato of the summer! first flower forming on our summer squash (we know it is a male flower because Ms. Aimee says that the male flowers form first)
- Botany: look at Botany nomenclature (Leaf Morphology Chart by ETC Montessori: Shape, Arrangement, Margin, Venation)
Special Guest: Ms. Aimee, my co-teacher for this block, gave a presentation on The Custard Apple Family (pawpaws in particular)
interestingly, the Custard Apple Family is traditionally tropical and adapted for that environment
the pawpaw is the only plant from that family which lives outside of the tropics (it was previously carried around by ground sloths which died out 10,000 years ago... then humans began to move it about)
the pawpaw is very strange in so many ways, not only that it ventures so far North!
the pawpaw is a wonderful plant to discuss when it comes to plant reproduction because it makes life very hard for itself (sends out suckers and crowds clones of itself around itself but it can't reproduce with itself, requires a genetically different pawpaw to be very nearby because it has very lazy pollinators [flies and beetles], seeds must be cold stratified before they will germinate, prefers to grow in shade for its first year but then wants full sun thereafter in order to bear fruit)
interestingly, the pawpaw is an important host plant (it is the only plant on which the larvae of the Zebra Swallowtail Butterflies will feed)
taste guanabana juice (also in the Custard Family)
discuss Bromeliads as well, since the Early Childhood students are trying to grow a pineapple
we also talked about the larger theme of plant categories -- who decides what goes where?, what do they look at when making that determination? is it genetics? is it structure? why are the names of plant families changing over time?
add Pawpaw to MLB (we do have baby pawpaw trees here which we can sketch)
- Indoor Board Games on a Hot Afternoon: Snail's Pace Race, Orchard, Square Up!, Guess Who?, Ocean Bingo, Prime Climb, Battleship
at the start of the school year, the Early Childhood children kept much to themselves, but as they are getting more comfortable with the older children they are playing together, so I am no longer putting my notes for EC in a separate category... these board games are being played by a variety of children of mixed ages (which is great to see!)
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Immersive Experience
Immersive Experience
Immersive Experience
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