The Turnips Have Sprouted!

Ms. Fair's class have been out to check out their newly sprouting plants! We have LOTS and LOTS of turnips and mustard greens coming up! I need to ask them if they sang to the turnips again!

Planting Turnips With Ms. Fair's 2nd Graders

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This week the second grade's reading story was "The Enormous Turnip". I just so happened to have some turnip seeds that needed to be planted in the raised beds so Ms. Fair and I came up with a plan! So we took the kids out and planted the seeds. The students were just precious! They were so excited to be planting. As they watered in the seed some began to sing a little song from the story and soon they were all singing, "Grow Grow Little Turnip, Grow Sweet , Grow Strong!". It was too cute!

While were were out there we planted some Mustard Green seeds too. I must say this year our Fall Garden is doing so much better than last years! I guess maybe Mother Nature is making up for our Spring Garden getting drowned with too much water! ;-)

Making A Salad

On Tuesday, Mrs. Glandon's first graders picked lettuce out of our garden. It was a nice sunny morning just perfect for working in the garden! Once they picked the lettuce, they took it inside, washed it and then made a beautiful salad. They even shared a bowl with me! I was delighted!

The type of lettuce they were eating is called Butter Crunch. It was very tasty. Did you know that when you are eating lettuce you are eating the leaves of a plant? This is one of the things that Mrs. Glandon's class learned.

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I'm not the only one who has been busy this week!

Our friendly Banana Spider has been really busy! Today I took Ms. Cahill's first graders outside to water the plants and look what we found! Just yesterday this spider was still in her web sitting just like she did all last week but today we saw that she made an egg sac last night! She also has turned around so that you can see the top of her body. I think she turned so that she could guard her eggs better. She certainly looks scarier from the front! I wonder if she will be like Charlotte from Charlotte's Web and die soon after her eggs hatch? We are going to have to keep an eye on this little lady and her egg sac!

Going on a Bug Hunt!

This morning Ms. Fair's class and I went out to the Outdoor Classroom to try to find some bugs to photograph. We didn't find a lot of bugs today but we did find a HUGE banana spider. She has made her web on the right side of the greenhouse and although she might look scary and very poisonous, she is harmless. So please remember to respect her habitat and do not harm her. You can learn more about Banana Spiders here.

We also came across what I grew up calling a "cow" ant but we learned that it is actually called a "Velvet Ant". We learned that it is not even an ant at all. It's a wasp. You can learn more here.

We also found aphids on some milkweed. Aphids attract ladybugs but we didn't find any today.

We found this "skin" shed by a grasshopper. It looked like a ghost of a grasshopper.

Later on we spotted the "real" grasshopper!

Before we left to go inside, we fed the very hungry fish!

Picking Peanuts!

On September the 22nd Mrs. Jackson's 3rd grade class went out to the garden and harvested the peanuts that we planted in the spring. It was a bright sunny day and perfect for picking peanuts. We harvested about a 5 gallon container! That's a lot of peanuts! The students washed the peanuts and got them ready to be boiled. Mrs. Williams, the cafeteria manager, cooked them for the class the next day. They were delicious!

We learned alot about the peanut. Some of us had no idea that peanuts grow under the ground! When you harvest them you have to pull them out of the ground and pick them off of the roots! Some of them get pulled off and stay in the ground so we have to dig around in the dirt to find them all. It's kind of like going peanut hunting!

We plan to plant even more next year because they grow so well here. Did you know that peanuts are one of Georgia's largest cash crops? You can learn more about it here.

Work Day

On September the 12th, we had our first Saturday workday of the 2009-2010 school year. The Outdoor Classroom was in great need of some attention! We were so fortunate to have well over 100 parent, student and staff volunteers! Within 3 hours our Outdoor Classroom was transformed! After all of our hard work, we enjoyed lunch that was prepared for us by our Assistant Principal, Judy Hellgren. It was such a great day and we got so much work completed! We added 8 raised beds and planted collard greens, rutabagas, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, and three types of lettuce.

Thanks to everyone who helped make our work day a success!