While the blogging has been lax, the garden has remained as busy as ever over the last two months. We finished winter classes with a special guest speaker, Sarah Marie Leone. Sarah engaged the students in a very lively discussion of all the creepy crawling creatures that live in the garden. This is the subject [...]
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Trinity Elementary Garden Update!
Rainy Days
Rainy days were such a drag when I was a kid. Stuck under those florescent lights for another hour?! Watching half a movie instead of recess, lunch, or even learning?! The worst. Now of course I am grateful for every rainy day. Each drop nourishes the soil, our plants, and washes the city clean. We [...]
The Spicebush Swallowtail Caterpillar
Children have a unique viewpoint in the garden. I am usually looking down at the plants whereas they look straight ahead and see amazing hidden things. In this case, one observant third grader spotted this guy: My eyes had scanned it from afar, but I was fooled. (Imagine it without the orange “tongue”, which only [...]
WATER
It is fixed, hallelujah! Nothing can grow, especially vegetables, without a watering system. It is THE life force. The gage was off for over a month but we didn’t realize it until two weeks ago when newly planted seeds refused to sprout. The established plants appeared to be just finishing their life cycle. The school had [...]
How to Become a Scientist
Today we began a new five-week session with two third-grade teachers and their classes: Mr Chow and Ms Mendoza. Again we spent the first ten minutes silently observing a part of the garden and writing down the observations using all of the five senses. From these observations, the students developed questions. This is how all [...]
Welcome to the Garden, Birds of Los Angeles
Ben and Danielle led Mrs. Gonzalez’s class through another fun garden art project this week. They took magnolia seed pods, covered them in peanut butter, rolled them in bird seed , and hung them from the garden’s trees. I had to miss it, so I don’t know much about the details, but I hear everyone [...]
Jumping into Fall
The weather has been adamantly fighting us on our fall/winter planting schedule. Everyone in Los Angeles feels it this time of year. A few days of cool, rainy autumn weather easily give way to another string of 90+ degree days. -sigh- This week we went ahead and planted a few of our fall crops anyway. [...]
Flower Bookmarks at Trinity Elementary
This morning, after both recesses and then watering the plants with the special ed class, we had our absolute favorite garden activity to date: flower-pressed bookmarks! First we gathered eight different kinds of flower petals from around the garden: Then each student made an artful arrangement on a plain bookmark: The design was kept [...]
Rainbow Swiss Chard
This week we took an extensive look at one of Trinity garden’s most prolific vegetables: Rainbow Swiss Chard! One of the garden beds is overrun with it after the plants from last year dropped hundreds of seeds. Luckily the 5th graders just completed a science segment on vascular plants (ie celery) so they knew more [...]
The Garden Classroom
We’ve ramped up slowly at Trinity to get ready for the new school year. For the first three weeks we were only open during recess, but this week we welcomed our first group of classes! The students for the most part are interested in all the wildlife that has moved in over the last year: [...]
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