Spring is in the Air!!!

Spring may just be my most favorite time of the year!!!  Especially with the extra long winter that we have had this year, it is a welcome sight in my eyes.  Since summer in North Carolina can be a little rough, Spring is just the best time.  Warm temperatures, abundant sunshine, Carolina Blue skies, and no HUMIDITY!!!  Perfection, if you ask me.

One of the things that I love to do most with my class is garden.  Typically, I begin planting with my kids in late January and early February.  But considering this winter has been horrible and just last weekend it was 24 degrees, gardening has been delayed!

I think now that our freeze warnings are behind us, it's time to get our hands dirty!!!  A local nursery donated brand new dirt for us and we shoveled it in this week.

I am excited to get my kids out there in those beds and begin planting.  We will be partnering with our PTO this year as an economics lesson.  My students will be growing, harvesting, and then on Fridays selling their plants at our school's Farmer's Market!  All the money earned will be donated back to our PTO.  I am so excited to get started!

First up this week is one of my favorite activities from a fellow NC blogger.  Rachel Lamb, also known as The Tattooed Teacher, has made a really cute little gardening activity that I highly recommend.  I always begin my gardening with this cute activity.  Be sure to check it out!!

Gardens, Butterflies, and Ladybugs, OH MY!

We have had several good days of rain lately!  So when I got to school today, I noticed that we would need to pick some of our carrots.  We headed outside and found these

As I pulled the carrots out, I noticed several little ladybug larvae crawling around in the dirt.  Check it out. (this is in Heather's hand)

We have been keeping busy learning all about the complete metamorphosis of insects.  As I was showing them the ladybug larvae, one of my students said, "look, here's a pupa!"  I was SO excited.  We haven't talked about the ladybug life cycle yet.  When I showed them the larvae it was the first time they had even seen one.  I was so impressed that this student applied his knowledge from mealworms and butterflies to ladybugs.  I turned around quickly and saw what he pointed to.  It was in fact, a ladybug pupa right on the wall outside my classroom window.

So amazing!  Well, we needed to move inside and get to work.  However, work in the garden had to continue.  So I left small groups of students with our full time substitute.  They harvested peas, carrots, and lettuce to take home.  We even got one onion! 

The next amazing thing was what one of my students found munching on some lettuce and dill.  2 monarch caterpillars.  When we study butterflies, we raise Painted Lady Butterflies.  I have actually never seen a monarch caterpillar before!  It was absolutely amazing!

It was just such a fun day of getting our hands dirty and learning about insects in REAL LIFE!  I can't wait to keep our eyes on these two caterpillars and see them go into their chrysalis!  I sure do love those gardens and how much Heather and I can teach to our kids through it!

Full Moon

Wowzah!  What a week.  Did anyone else feel this way?  I feel like I woke up on each day this week (including Monday!) thinking this was the longest week ever!  My kids were a little off kilter this week.  I checked my moon phase app on my phone daily this week (yep you read that correctly, I have a moon phase app on my phone!) to see if there was a full moon.  Then finally on Thursday when I looked it up, it finally validated what I had been feeling all week long, the moon app said this:

As I was driving to school on Thursday, this is what I saw!  (I promise I was stopped at a light when I snapped the pic!)

Despite the craziness, we still managed to have a great week as we focused on Earth Day and the Lorax.  The weather was beautiful and we were able to get in some gardening!  Heather and I found ourselves in the gardens after school because we had SO much lettuce.  I am so thrilled that we planted when we did in January.  It was a gamble since this winter was pretty harsh for around here.  But now, our kids have had the joy watching our gardens mature and have been able to harvest their hard work.  We headed out this week with my little girl who is in Kindergarten.  She loves to help in the garden and does a great job picking lettuce for us.  She even places one piece of lettuce at a time on each of my kids' desks so it is fair.  Then the kids bag them all up.  It's a great little system.  So far in the last 2 weeks, my kids have taken 3 quart bags of lettuce home with them.  Remember I have 25 kids in my class, so if you do the math that is 75 quarts of lettuce that we have harvested so far!!!

Here is Heather harvesting for her kids.

We do let our kids go out and pick the lettuce themselves.  They've been also taking home parsley, dill, cilantro, and spinach.  But we have found that to keep up with the lettuce, we have to go out in between as well.  It is a good problem to have!  We are having a blast.  Have I mentioned how much I love gardening with kids!?!

We are officially on the countdown around here.  28 days.  What is your countdown?  We'd love to hear from you!  Got anything fun planned for the end of the year.  I know I am excited to start the balloon pop for the final 20 days!

Oh and one more fact before I go, the next full moon won't be until Saturday, May 25th!

Happy Saturday!

Super Sale and More

Good Morning Friends!
Does everyone have big plans for the big game tomorrow?  I am hosting a Super Bowl party at my house with some friends from my small group at church.  It should be a fun time.  I don't have any ties to either team, so I will be enjoying the company and commercials!  In honor of Super Bowl Sunday, Heather and I will both be participating in Teacher Pay Teacher's Super Sale tomorrow.  Head on over to our stores to pick up some of our great products for up to 28% off!!  I know we are excited to pick up some of the things we have been eyeing! (Thanks to Ashley Hughes for the cute button!)

Speaking of some products we've been eyeing, you might want to head over to see Rachel aka The Tattooed Teacher to pick up her cute Lil' Veggie Patch Cuties craftivity.  As you know, I love to garden with my class.  I love all of the standards you can teach through the garden!  We planted carrots, scallions, 3 types of lettuce, and peas.  We worked on partitioning rectangles into rows and columns.  We measured the distance between rows and seeds.  We used calendars to count days until germination and then harvesting.  We read Heroes of the Vegetable Patch.  A book you can get at your local IKEA.  Then we created How To Plant books and displayed them in the hallway with our cute Veggies!

We had such a great time getting our hands dirty!

Here are our charts that each group made!

If you like to garden with your kids, pick up your copy from Rachel!  It is on sale for the super sale as well!!!  I think Heather might pick it up too!  And don't forget to shop both heather and my store tomorrow for the Super Sale!!  You won't be disappointed!  

Happy Vegetable Gardening!

Pumpkins, conferences, and weddings...oh my!

Wow! Has anyone noticed we have been MIA?  We have been swamped!  We, like many of you out there, have been enjoying surviving parent conferences.  Whew - they are exhausting! I am not sure if I am missing some important social skill needed to get through these things comfortably, but they never end with me thinking "Well that was fun."  Don't get me wrong - I think they are very important and I love communicating important information to parents. But somehow most of them are always awkward.  Juli has two left and I have about 7 so we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

In addition to conferences taking up our time, we have been chasing down all evil doing and demanding justice for innocent pumpkins everywhere. Well, really just for the pumpkins in our garden. But it has been time consuming all the same.  If you remember from a previous post, a pumpkin was nabbed from our garden. It still remains a cold case. Just as we were starting to heal from that experience, evil struck our poor garden once again!  Juli went out to check on things and the majority of our pumpkins had been picked and smashed!!!!  When I found out I was upset angry borderline homicidal. We went to the front office and demanded to see the surveillance video from the weekend. Sure enough - Juli and I witnessed our pumpkins being thrown against the building by three boys.  The images are burned into our brains now. It was terrible!  I calmly suggested starting ranting that we call the cops ASAP.  The suggestion was not received with open arms by admin.  In the end, I never did get to call the cops. But the boys were identified and consequences were handed out.  When I was told of the punishment, I suggested the boys also be responsible for replacing the lost pumpkins. New pumpkins have been purchased, 4 garden beds got weeded without any sweat or tears or blood from us, and apologizes were accepted.  I hoping this is the end to assaults on our garden. I am not sure how much more we can handle!  I am also hoping that word has gotten out that Juli and I avenge all wrong doing that occurs in the garden so that future wrong doers decide to leave our garden alone.

And the last thing that has taken up so much of our time...a wedding!  One of our teammates who we love dearly got married this weekend! It was BEAUTIFUL!  Juli and I and another coworker piled into her van with our husbands and traveled to Charleston, SC.  The wedding was on the beach, the weather and the bride were gorgeous, and we all had a blast.  Other than being called out for being old by a young guest at the wedding, it could not have been better. The conversation with the young lady went sort of like this...
Heather - "Yeah, I graduated from the same high school as him."
Young Guest - "What year did you graduate?"
Heather - "1996"
Young Guest - "Oh that was the year I was born!"
Juli - "uh oh" and starts to take a drink to avoid to be involved in the conversation
Heather - "No way...wow...I feel so old"
Young Guest - "Don't worry - you look good for your age."
Juli -  starts choking on her drink

I pretty much ended the conversation at that point to go find a glass of wine. Because seriously when you are told you look good for your age, a glass of wine is pretty much the only thing that will help. 

We have lots more blogging to do....we have been Boo'd and our upcoming giveaway! However,  I think I have made this long enough. To close, I am including a picture of Juli and I at the wedding.  I am the older lady next to Juli.  I hear I look pretty good for my age though!

Pumpkin Thief!

What is the world coming to?
Seriously!
If you have been following us for awhile, you will remember that Juli and I  (and our 5 children under 6) braved the July heat to clean up our school garden and plant pumpkin seeds. Our plan was that the pumpkins would be ready by the end of October for a math and science investigation for our kids.  Everything has been going well...we check on the pumpkins - they are tiny at first and slowly starting to grow.  Finally one was the size of a basketball and it is only the first week of October! Juli and I were pumped! So Juli goes to check on the pumpkins today and then....
it was GONE!
Our big pumpkin was gone.
STOLEN!
 From an elementary school garden!
Who does that?
When Juli broke the news today I was so mad!  I emailed our principal and asked if the video cameras picked up the criminal in the act. When we left this afternoon they were still not to the pumpkin stealing part so we are hoping that we have a suspect in the morning. I just can't believe that someone would steal our pumpkin! From what I understand about crime (from my extensive COPS watching) most missing cases have 48 hours to be solved for the best results. I am guessing we are moving on to around 24 hours since our pumpkin was nabbed so I preparing myself for the sad news that we may never see our pumpkin or the perp again.  I know - it's a lot of emotion for a pumpkin but we literally put our blood and sweat and tears into that garden. Well, the sweat and blood are mine and Juli's (the garden has killer weeds with thorns). The tears are mostly from our children who we wouldn't let use the gardening tools they wanted.  But still - it has blood, sweat, and tears put into it all the same!

On a happier note, Juli and I have reached 100 followers! Yay followers - we love you! We would like to do a really big giveaway to celebrate. We are brainstorming a few ideas. If you would be interested in donating to our giveaway, please let us know. We love all the blogs we stalk follow out there so we would love to share your great stuff with a giveaway winner. Hope everyone has a happy Friday!

Watermelon Update

Do you remember when Heather and I took our classes out and planted watermelon seeds using rectangular arrays?  We posted about it HERE.  This week, I went to the garden to check on the beds and to water the few fruits and veggies we had.  I didn't get a chance to take a picture of the watermelon that we picked, but I did manage to snap this picture of my littles enjoying the sweet fruit!  This was only half of the watermelon.  We enjoyed the other half the next day at the pool.  I LOVE gardening with my kids at school and my kids at home.  Eating this watermelon with my kids made me very excited for the pumpkins that we planted.  We told you about it here.  When I went to water, we had little pumpkin sprouts!!  How exciting it will be to use our pumpkins that we have grown to use for pumpkin math day around Halloween.  As exciting as that will be, I am soaking up the next few weeks and relishing every little minute I have with these sweet faces.  Summer goes by too quickly!!!

Garden Meet Up!

It seems like Heather and I have been taking our little summer trips on opposite weeks since school has been out.  While I was gone to the beach, she watered and took care of the garden.  When I got back, she left for the beach so I watered and took care of the garden.  When she got back, I headed to Florida for the week so she took care of it.  It's crazy that we are half way through July and we haven't even seen each other yet.  So, now that our vacations are over, we felt we needed to get together.  Yesterday was a great day to do it. We planned to meet in the garden and clear out two beds for us to plant pumpkins in!  This past October, I did a pumpkin math day where I had my students do experiments with pumpkins.  There are so many standards you can hit using a pumpkin, it's crazy.  I also teach a large non-fiction readers workshop unit at the same time so the integration is amazing!  As Heather and I have been planning, we thought that it would take this unit to the next level if the students could raise the pumpkins themselves and use the pumpkins for the pumpkin math day.  I think that they will absolutely LOVE it!  Unfortunately, since we aren't a year round school, it is hard for the students to see the entire life cycle of a pumpkin.  But there are only a few more weeks until we are back, so they will get to see most of it.  There are SO many ways that you can teach children through gardening and we are excited to have found yet another way!  Stop back in October to see how it turned out!!!


Juli

Heather and her two boys, Plus Juli's three kids enjoying a snack in the shade.
You can see our raised beds garden in the background.

All Sorts of Arrays

This past week we embarked on rectangular arrays (2.OA4).  Each morning, we debrief with one another about the day prior and what we will be doing that day.  As we were talking late last week about teaching arrays, Heather mentioned how fun it would be to relate arrays to planting a garden.  *Insert Lightbulb moment!*

I (Juli) had 12 raised beds gardens built last year in conjunction with a lesson that I taught that went horribly wrong (there is a great story to that which will have to come at a later time) and an Eagle Scout who was a student of my husband's who desperately needed a project to complete.  The gardens were built for the entire school and haven't seen much use until this year.  The more I thought about it, I decided that not only were we going to relate arrays to gardening, but we were going to have all of our kids out there in the gardens planting seeds in rectangular arrays!

I checked to see what, if any, seeds needed to be planted this week and discovered that we needed to plant both melons and watermelons.  

We pulled butcher paper roughly the size of the raised beds.  We divided our classes into 4 total groups.  As a group, they had to determine what array would work best on the paper and in the garden.  Team A was planting watermelon seeds and needed 10 inches of space between the seeds.  Team B was planting melons and needed 12 inches of space between the seeds.  (2.MD.1)  

They used their rulers and began marking their big butcher paper into a huge 2x7 array.  Then we had them figure out their repeated addition sentences that went along with their arrays.  

Next, we all headed out into the gardens to begin planting.  We placed the butcher paper into the gardens and pushed Popsicle sticks through the holes.

When we moved the paper from the beds, we had an array of popsicle sticks that let us know exactly where to plant the seeds in the bed.  

Here is Heather with her kids, planting the seeds in the beds.  

The kids put the seeds in the beds and hopefully in 85-90 days we will have lots of watermelons and melons!  The funny thing was that after we got the seeds planted and we were back inside, we pulled up the calendar and together figured out when it would be time for our melons to be harvested.  After looking at the calendar, both classes were SO bummed when they realized that we wouldn't be in school when they're ready.  Hopefully, we can arrange for the kids to come and see them when they get picked!

It was a great day overall and we 're thrilled how we integrated so many math and science skills all while making arrays real to our kids!

Juli