diy patchwork pots {and planting in the classroom)

 I don't know about you but my class really likes to dig in the dirt. They so enjoyed planting out their sunflower sprouts that when the opportunity presented itself for another garden project I jumped right in. We ended our school year with a Shakespeare celebration that involved the entire student body. From my wee threess to our graduation class, our students got up on our outdoor stage and performed  their interpretations of Shakespeare...Julius Ceasar to be exact (also a smidge of Sophocles' Antigone). Wanting our youngsters to be able to take part, we decided to teach the preschool, Jr. K, and Kindergarteners a verse from A Midsummer Night's Dream. To assist the youngsters in understanding the verse, we brought in the plants from our verse for the children to touch and explore. One of our plants was wild thyme and after our program, we planted it out into our own pots to take home but first we had to decorate those pots!

The first thing we did was paint the outside (and for some, the inside) of our pots white.  This was done over the course of two days. The pots sat for awhile on our windowsill while we explored others areas of interest for awhile. When the kiddos were ready, we brushed on precut tissue paper squares using a bit of liquid starch. This too was done over the course of two days. On our last day of school the children each got to plant their wild thyme into their pots. We reviewed the concepts of sequence, order, and steps and the children talked a lot about when they planted out their sunflower sprouts.

I did not get a chance to seal their tissue covered pots so when the tissue gets wet, it gets a little sticky but they sure do look nifty, don't ya think?

investigating plants and flowers

This project and center came about when we were studying plants, flowers, and sequencing. You can see that our sunflowers had begun sprouting in their egg cartons. The children were really excited about that and it gave us an opportunity to talk about the parts of a plant. I had previously left the sprouts out so that my co-teachers could help me keep and eye out and water them when I was not there. By co-teachers, I mean we share a room. There are three of us in the room and three separate classes. Two of our classes run with the same themes and book titles while the third is a camp class of sorts and is always full of fun happenings. Our Friday teacher set this up on our science table thinking we would like to do this with our kiddos as well and she was totally right. Since it was also our week of A Rainbow of My Own, I swapped out the trays or rainbow colors and added our polka tray in the center to hold the parts. I brought in flowers from my garden at home and culled from the leftover plants we had from the previous week and set them out to for the kiddos to explore.

We talked about the parts of the plants and went through the various names as each child selected something from the polka dot tray. On our tray, was an assortment of the renegade bean plants that sprout when we "accidentally" leave black beans in the sand box after sensory play. One of the kiddos totally made the connection and insisted on going outside to harvest the remaining plants. Of course this led to others wanting to plant more so out came the tub of black beans as the children carefully planted them in our sandbox.