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Thankful for my favourite people, in one of our favourite places! Also thankful for the random stranger who encouraged me to jump in the photo, because I really don’t get in the photos very often and it’s nice to capture us all together once in awhile. Wishing all my Canadian friends and colleagues a restful and joyful Thanksgiving weekend! 🦃 🥧 🍁

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If you’ve been following along my Instagram, or read my blog, you know that growing food is a big part of our learning in the garden classroom. Helping students appreciate and understand the full farm to fork process is an important part of our garden pedagogy, but what really matters in most of these experiences, is the joyful wonder children develop as they become more curious about where their food comes from. Keeping the garden learning playful is really important to @sarahkate55 and I. So when our pink popcorn was dried, we harvested the kernels and popped them on a camp stove on a cold, clear, and sunny day 🍿If you want two whole classes of kindergarteners to sit super quietly together, pop some popcorn outside with them! They were thrilled by the smells, sounds, and tastes of their harvested corn being popped in our garden. Such a fun way to connect kids to our garden, and such an easy way to help children understand that popcorn does, actually, come from a cob of corn! 🌽 #f2sbc

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This week has been all about categorizing, appreciating, and observing living things. And then this morning we had an unexpected, and quite early, frost ❄️ Nature provided us with the perfect extension to our inquiry of living things. Today we were wondering, observing, and exploring how seasonal change can affect living things.

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Bright blue October skies, fall colours, and a garden that is ready for winter! I really love our classroom on days like today 💚 #f2sbc

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We found some local winter veggie starts ready for transplanting this week 🌱 They’re a bit root bound, so we learned how to gently untangle the roots so the plant can grow deep into the soil and not in a continuous circle! Winterbor kale is a hardy vegetable that over-winters well. Good thing, because we’ve got a spell of cold weather coming, so we’ll see how they hold up! Transplanting winter veggies is a great way to draw children’s attention to the changing seasons, seasonal temperature fluctuations, and how the garden slows right down as we head into the colder months in our corner of the world ❄️

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We’re observing life in our garden classroom and working towards a collective understanding of what defines a living thing. We’re also, unfortunately, doing some hard work on the value of said living things in our ecosystem. Many of our new-to-the-garden students have never spent time with the multitude of critters that live in our garden and react with fear or violence when they encounter the biodiversity of insects in our garden classroom. So we work, over time, to normalize and habituate children to the important work our pollinators and decomposers do alongside us to help our garden grow. We had a brief catch and release today so children could examine centipedes, spiders, ground beetles, slugs, bumblebees, and wood bugs closely. The goal is to nurture a curiosity that might lead to a connection, that will hopefully develop an ethic of care, that will become a habit of empathy for our living and non-living world 🌎 #f2sbc

Seasonal Tips & Tricks

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