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Garden Literacy With Story Stones

This post has been edited to support families learning at home during the COVID 19 home learning season. Story stones…
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10 Pumpkin Life Cycle Books
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What Seeds Need To Grow: A Seed Inquiry
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This is your child's brain on play!
What is Risky Play?
How To Build a DIY Fairy Garden In 3 Easy Steps!
Best kid clothing for learning outdoors

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Maybe I’m just having a rough few weeks, or mayb

Maybe I’m just having a rough few weeks, or maybe we all are having a tough go of it 🤷‍♀️ ?? But everything definitely feels HARDER this year. I’m seeing a significant need for explicit, direct instruction with kids I’ve worked with year over year. Which is unusual. Typically, a big perk of my job is that I get to scaffold on the skills and knowledge we build on with children as they return to the garden classroom the following year. With tool use, we clearly define tools as having a distinct purpose, and we carefully teach safe use of each tool. Children understand tools are for work {or play that uses the tool in the way it is intended to be used}. And yet. This week I threw out two shovels that were intentionally broken. I also had to remind children not to smash glue sticks into our tables and wood mulch. There was a conversation about not cutting the tops off coloured pencils. And several reminders that hitting is not effective problem solving. I could go on. In any case, an acknowledgement that kids are having a tough time these days too. That the need for unstructured play is HUGE right now so kids can process and make sense of what is happening around them. This is hard work for teachers. It is exhausting work. But I do see the difference it makes. Now more than ever! We just have to hold space for play, and I think they’ll end up ok. 💚

A full day of learning at the C2C provincial confe

A full day of learning at the C2C provincial conference today! Thank you to the hundreds of educators that gathered for #psa2020 with an interest in learning outside the classroom 🥳 I was glad to share my thinking on risky learning and practical wisdom with Dr. Hartley Banack this morning, and how we might connect kids to place with risky play this afternoon! 💚

Today was one of those days that can only be descr

Today was one of those days that can only be described as UGH! On the bright side, I get to teach my youngest and his class all afternoon every Wednesday, so that was a good thing. And we even wore our matching #takemeoutside shirts 🤩So here we are on a sunny afternoon pretending there isn’t a MASSIVE infestation of book lice in my shared office 🤮 After two days of online research and feeling phantom itches all over, I’ve learned they actually eat microscopic moulds, not books. Or the blood of humans. They’re actually not even related to lice. And are totally harmless. But they’ve got “lice” in their name, which is all kinds of 😱 So I’ve transitioned from thinking I would have to start a bonfire with 25 years of teaching resources, to “maybe if we can turn the heat up enough and dehumidify the room, I can keep a few things” 🤷‍♀️ 🔥 And on top of all that chaos, some lousy jerk stole one of our straw bales last night. Pulled right up in their vehicle to our school garden, and drove away with it. Who does that? Seriously! If you are reading this, and live in our community, and have straw bales for Halloween decorations, we will gladly accept any surplus bales as donations in November!! We love them as loose parts and they get plenty of love from our entire student body 🍂 So if you are still reading this, thanks for letting me vent 😜 It’s been a long day of sanitizing my shelves and knocking psocids out of my books. How was your day 🥴?

Thinking about where numbers live in our school ga

Thinking about where numbers live in our school garden this week with our Kinders. Gathering garden treasures, and explaining what numbers we see for #takemeoutsideday 🍁 I’m always so very impressed when a young learner can articulate there are 8 points on a single leaf, so it best represents the number 8 for them🤩!!

Hapa Zome is an ancient technique of pounding leav

Hapa Zome is an ancient technique of pounding leaves and flowers to extract their pigment. It’s a child-friendly way to experiment with print making (and with all our fall blooms having what is likely their last week of glory), it seemed like the right time to bring out the hammers and cloth. Big thank you to @morequilts who saved us the perfect squares of cloth for this project!

We have a dwarf Italian Honey Fig tree in our scho

We have a dwarf Italian Honey Fig tree in our school garden and the fall crop is ready now! Figs are wonderfully sweet snacks for kids if you are looking to add a perennial crop to your school garden that you can harvest in the fall 💚

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