Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Spud Harvest

Harvest Time
I didn't have high hopes of great success since the last time we did this, two years ago, we didn't grow more than a dozen potatoes.
But the plants looked big and healthy so it showed promise.

We started by sharing the book Tops & Bottoms 
by Janet Stevens
I like this book for a couple of reasons.
One, it focuses on parts of the plants that are edible and not.
Two, it talks about consequences that may happen when you rely on someone else to do all the hard work.

Before we started pulling at the leaves I asked the question
"Which part of the potato plant do we eat, the tops or the bottoms?"
Interesting that half of the children said the tops.
Time to pull and dig and find out.
The expression on the little boy's face shows how hard it was
for them to pull the potatoes out of the soil.
Some stems broke but we managed to get potatoes out.
It was exciting.
Then we used our hands and shovels to dig for the rest.
When all the leaves and stems (the tops) were gone 
we thought we had found all the potatoes (the bottoms).
But then two little boys, brothers, arrived and wanted to play in the soil.
Sure.
And we found a lot more potatoes deep in the tub.
They had the privilege of washing the spuds too.

But how many spuds did we grow?
We sorted by size - 
small, medium, large.
 We estimated how many potatoes there were altogether.
 
Then counted each group and added them together.
For a grand total of 47.
YAY!
Next week is our Spud Celebration with our big buddy class.



Frog Faces

 
We took our tadpoles to the pond to let them go.
But before we did we made frog faces.
Very simple frog face cut outs that the children could colour, glue on wiggly
eyes then stick a red party blower in the hole for it's mouth.
It was hard for some to wait to put it altogether before blowing out the tongue.
But most finished theirs.




Me too!
Then at story time we sang Little Green Frog.
We managed to record our little performance.


Then off we went to the pond.